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LIBRARY 

UNITED STATES BUREAU OF EDUCATION, 

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR. 



Entry Catalogue Number 

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PRESENTED BY 




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Boston 



The Place and the People 



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BOSTON 

The Place and 
the People. "By 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE 

Illustrated by Louis A. Holman 



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New York 
The Macmillan Company 

London: Macmillan <5 Co. Limited 

Jifineteen Hundred and Three. All rights reserved 



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Copyright, 1903, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up, elcctrotyped, and published October, 1903. 



Xottoooli iPrfSS 

J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick .% Smith Co. 
Norwood. Mass., U.S.A. 



TO 

F. H. O. H. 

MY BEST HERITAGE 
FROM TH£. ..-.. ■ 
CITY OF HER FATH^S 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The volumes of biography bearing directly upon 
Boston history are many. To these and to shorter 
memoirs of men and women whose lives have been 
identified with the place, the author is chiefly indebted 
for whatever flavor of reality his own pages have 
attained. How many persons and events he has 
been forced to ignore, or touch but lightly, the 
reader with the slenderest knowledge of the local 
records will detect. Others will recognize, as familiar 
friends, the most bountiful sources of information. 
The list of them would be long; and the writer must 
content himself with a special word of acknowledg- 
ment to the text and references of the exhaustive 
Memorial History of Boston^ edited by Justin Winsor, 
and to the shorter narrative, Boston^ by the Hon. 
Henry Cabot Lodge. Finally to Mr. J. P. Quincy 
and Mr. Edwin M. Bacon, for their valuable com- 
ments upon manuscript and proof, a peculiar debt 
is due. 

Boston, August, 1903. 



CONTENTS 



I. Foundation and Early Years 

II. Colonial Boston 

III. Provincial Boston 

IV. Revolutionary Boston 
V. From Town to City 

VI. The Hub and the Wheel 

VII. "The Boston Religion" . 

VIII. The "Literary Centre" 

IX. The Slave and the Union 

X. Men and Monuments 

XL Water and Fire 

XII. The Modern Inheritance 



PAGE 
I 

26 

54 

87 
123 

156 

190 

222 

250 
297 
350 
372 




THE FANEUIL HALL VANE 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

John Winthrop : autograph, seal, and portrait by Van Dyck, in 

Massachusetts State House .... Frontispiece 

Mural Tablet, Liberty Tree Block, Washington Street . Title-page 



Faneuil Hall Vane ....... 

Province House Vane ..... 

Seal of City of Boston, adopted 1827 

Initial, Original Charter, Massachusetts Bay Company . 

Winthrop Cup, First Church Communion Plate 

Facsimile of Resolution naming Boston, from Town Records 

Old Corner Bookstore ...... 

Sir Henry Vane ....... 

Autograph of Robert Keayne ..... 

Royal Arms, from Council Chamber, Old State House . 

A Bit of Fort Independence (Castle Island) 

Tremont Street and the Common, about I 800 

Roger Williams 

John Eliot preaching to the Indians 

King PhiHp's Mark 

King Philip's Bowl 

Pine Tree Shillings . . 



PAGE 

xi 

XV 

I 

5 

8 

1 1 

15 
21 

25 
26 
29 

34 
39 
45 
50 
51 
52 



Xll 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Cross captured at Louisburg 

From the Great Seal of New England 

Cotton Mather .... 

Samuel Sewall's Book-plate (reduced) 
Old Brick Church .... 

Cockerel Church Vane 

Mather Byles's Clock 

Old South Church, 1903 

George Whitefield .... 

Original Faneuil Hall . . . 

Faneuil Hall of To-day 
Entrance to Governor Shirley's Mansion 
Stamp Act Stamps . . „ . 

Samuel Adams .... 

Royal Proclamation, for suppressing Rebellion and Sedition 
Proposal of " Loyal Citizens" of Boston to support Genera 
Howe ...... 

Hutchinson House ..... 

" Boycott" Handbill .... 

Francis Rotch ..... 

Christ Church ..... 

Paul Revere ...... 

Revolutionary Handbill .... 

General Gage's Headquarters 

Tower on Dorchester Heights (South Boston) 

Washington Medal .... 

John Hancock's Tea-kettle and Money Trunk 
Hancock House ..... 

Federal Street Theatre .... 



54 

57 

63 
66 

71 
72 

73 
75 
78 
80 
81 

85 
87 
92 

95 

97 
100 
104 
106 
109 
1 1 1 

'13 
114 
119 
1 20 

123 
127 
135 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



xui 



Tontine Crescent . 

Boston Athensum . 

Removing Beacon Hill 

House of John Phillips 

Seal of Boston Marine Society . 

Earliest Chart of Boston Harbor 

" Hull's Victory " 

The Constitution 

Autograph of Captain Robert Gray 

Drawing by George Davidson of Columbia Expedit 

Drawing by George Davidson of Columbia Expedition 

Frederic Tudor 

Advertisement of Ice for Sale in Martinique, 1806 

Autograph Motto of Frederic Tudor . 

Sailing oi Britannia, February 3, 1844 

Emblem from Porch of Trinity Church 

Jonathan Mayhew . o . . 

King's Chapel .... 

Lyman Beecher . ,, . . 

William Ellery Channing Monument . 

Park Street Church 

Lyman Beecher' s Church, Bowdoin Street 

Theodore Parker .... 

First Boston Imprint . . 

Boston Primer .... 

Ticknor House, 1903 

House of Charles Sumner 

House of W. H. Prescott 

Diagram of Saturday Club Dinner 



38 
[42 

51 

54 
56 

57 

59 
161 

64 
■65 
.69 

73 
74 
75 
'5 
[90 
[91 
[97 
204 
207 
21 1 
2 14 
217 
222 
224 
232 
233 
235 
245 



XIV 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

Massachusetts Historical Society Building .... 248 


Lock and Key of Leverett Street Jail, 1835 . 


250 


William Lloyd Garrison ...... 


251 


Final Heading of The Liberator .... 


253 


Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George 




Thompson ....... 


261 


Lydia Maria Child ....... 


266 


Maria Weston Chapman ...... 


269 


Wendell Phillips 


271 


Autograph Sentence and Signature of Charles Sumner 


275 


Old Court House ....... 


276 


Old State House ....... 


281 


Tablet at Corner of Essex Street and Harrison Avenue Extensior 


1 285 


Charles Sumner ....... 


287 


John Albion Andrew ...... 


290 


Shaw Memorial ....... 


293 


Ball's Washington ....... 


297 


Josiah Quincy ....... 


299 


Edward Everett . ...... 


302 


House of Daniel Webster ..... 


305 


Water Celebration ....... 


311 


John Lowell, Jr. ...... . 


315 


Horace Mann ....... 


318 


Thomas Handasyd Perkins ..... 


. 321 


Early Ether Operation ...... 


327 


Boston Public Library : Bates Hall .... 


333 


William Barton Rogers . . . , . 


336 


House of Edwin Booth ...... 


339 


Museum of Fine Arts : Greek Sculptures 


■ 341 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



XV 



Phillips Brooks 

Trinity Church Tower . 

Trinity Church, Summer Street 

Back Bay in 1 8 1 4 . 

Back Bay in 1836 . 

Site of Mechanics' Fair Building, 187 

Water-color Drawing 
View from State House, 1858 . 
Ruins of Great Fire 
Entrance to South Terminal Station 
Franklin Park : Playstead 
North End Beach . 
Bonner Map, 1722, and Modern Boston Proper 
Pitcher in Possession of Bostonian Society 



I, From Contemporary 



344 
347 
350 
354 
355 

359 
361 

372 
379 
383 
386 
388 




THE PROVINCE HOUSE VANE 



BOSTON 

The Place and the People 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 




T 



^HE lover of the pic- 
turesque makes just 
complaint against modern 
life for its levelling and 
all-assimilating tendencies. 
Through a thousand agen- 
cies, individuals are under- 
going the experience of 
fractions about to be added, 
— reduction to a common 
denominator. Perform the addition, and your sum 
total represents the vast, homogeneous modern state. 
When the persons of such a state build a city, it can- 
not be expected to differ in any marked degree from 
the city founded just before or after it. Not so the 
cities and men of the older time. It was inevitable 
that the town should begin and continue with highly 
characteristic qualities of its own. 



2 BOSTON 

The wit who said, " Boston is not a city, but a state 
of mind," may not have realized how much of historic 
significance was in his remark. If there ever was a 
community which did not merely happen, but repre- 
sented a definite idea, embodied and strengthened 
through all the life of its formative years, that com- 
munity was the city — the "state of mind" — of 
Boston. " This town of Boston," said Emerson, " has 
a history. It is not an accident, not a windmill, or a 
railroad station, or cross-roads tavern, or an army-bar- 
racks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth ; 
but a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a 
sentiment and marching loyally whither that should 
lead them ; so that its annals are great historical lines, 
inextricably national ; part of the history of political 
liberty. I do not speak with any fondness, but the 
language of coldest history, when I say that Boston 
commands attention as the town which was appointed 
in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of 
North America." 

The town to which such leadership can be ascribed 
must have had early leaders at whom it is well worth 
while to look ; and they in turn must have had their 
leadings in influences of no common moment and 
cogency. Like the heredity and childhood of every 
man and woman, the parentage and infancy of each 
American colony had a quality peculiar to itself and of 
the highest importance in determining its future course. 
This is no place for a comparative study of these qual- 
ities ; yet it should be noted that the Boston settlement 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 3 

held a unique distinction in the fact that with its 
founders came the actual charter of its existence and 
government. It was at first and for many years virtu- 
ally independent of control from the mother country. 
The first step toward this independence was taken 
when twelve members of the Massachusetts Bay Com- 
pany met in Cambridge in Old England, on August 
26, 1629, and signed their names to an agreement 
binding them and their families to emigrate to the 
Company's plantations, there to " inhabit and con- 
tinue," provided the whole government and the royal 
patent should be transferred and should remain with 
them. Two days later the Company as a whole voted 
to support this determination, and the distinctive be- 
ginnings of Boston were assured. 

Inconspicuous amongst the names of these twelve 
venturous spirits stood the signature of John Winthrop. 
Though he had but recently become a member of the 
Company, it was upon him about two months later 
that the office of governorship was conferred. He 
had received " extraordinary great commendations," 
the Records of the election say, " both for his integ- 
rity and sufficiency, as being one every [way] fitted and 
accomplished for the place of Governor." In his 
forty-first year, thrice married, a lawyer, justice of the 
peace, and Lord of the Manor of Groton, of excellent 
birth and breeding, acquired in part through two years 
of study at Trinity College, Cambridge ; equipped, 
moreover, with abundant native gifts of gentleness, 
strength, and wisdom, he was indeed as capable a rep- 



4 BOSTON 

resentative of the great Puritan gentry of England as 
could well be found to lead and mould the undertaking 
to which he was called. His English life belonged to 
that time of which George Herbert wrote: — 

** Religion stands on tiptoe in our land. 
Ready to pass to the American strand." 

While Winthrop himself was preparing in London for 
his momentous departure, and intending to leave his 
wife behind for a year, he could write to her thus : 
" If now the Lord be thy God, thou must show it by 
trusting in him, and resigning thyself quietly to his 
good pleasure. If now Christ be thy Husband, thou 
must show what sure and sweet intercourse is between 
him and thy soul, when it shall be no hard thing for 
thee to part with an earthly, mortal, infirm husband 
for his sake." 

If the domestic aspect of his enterprise was so 
regarded, it is no wonder that he should have written 
of its more general bearing : " seeing the Church 
hath no place left to fly into but the wilderness, what 
better work can there be, than to go and provide tab- 
ernacles and food for her against she comes thither." 
And in both these respects, the personal and the gen- 
eral, Winthrop was merely the mouthpiece for the 
controlling spirit of his followers. Of all the early 
comers to New England, one of their immediate 
successors said in 1688, "God sifted a whole nation 
that he might send choice grain into the wilderness." 
Winthrop and his closest associates could surely be 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 5 



called " choice grain." The company which during 
ten months of preparation joined itself to them was of 
course not wholly made up, like the leaders, of men of 
education and influence; but neither was it composed 
of mere adventurers and troublesome younger sons. It 
was drawn chiefly from the sturdy yeoman stock of the 
East Anglian counties, 
where Puritanism had 
its stronghold. In this 
quiet region it is not 
fanciful to place the 
average strength and 
stability of unmixed 
English character. 
Here was the England 
of pleasant farmsteads 
and well-ordered do- 
mestic life which Ten- 
nyson two centuries later knew as a boy, and has taught 
all readers of English poetry to regard as typical of 
his land. It was essentially a good place to come 
from, a hard place to leave ; and the rank and file of 
the emigration resembled its leaders in their readiness 
to give up an existing good for a problematical better, 
in which the freedom to worship God in their own 
way played an important part. Their idea of freedom 
may have involved much which seems slavish to mod- 
ern minds, yet it is no small thing for men to yield 
themselves as they did to the control of an idea. 

It was in October of 1629 that Winthrop was 




Initial Word of Original Charter of 

THE MASSACHUSEITS BAY COMPANY, 
PRESERVED IN THE STATE-HOUSE. 



6 BOSTON 

elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. 
Four of the twelve ships in which his expedition was 
to cross the Atlantic were ready to sail on the 22d 
of the following March, There were a few delays, 
but on the 8th of April the voyage actually began. 
With Winthrop on the Jrbella, named for the Lady 
Arbella, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, and wife of 
Isaac Johnson, were this lady herself, her husband. 
Sir Richard Saltonstall, William Coddington, the first 
governor of Rhode Island, Simon Bradstreet, the young- 
est assistant, destined to carry the earliest traditions of 
the colony farthest into its future, and others whose 
names are of frequent recurrence in the annals of 
New England. The three other ships were the 
Ambrose, the Jewel, and the Talbot. On one of these 
sailed John Wilson, the first minister of the " First 
Church of Boston." Before the actual departure 
took place the emigrants on board the Arbella ad- 
dressed a Farewell Letter " to the rest of their brethren 
in and of the Church of England." They wrote " as 
those who esteem it our honor to call the Church of 
England, from whence we rise, our dear mother;" and 
declared," we leave it not, therefore, as loathing that milk 
wherewith we were nourished there." The Pilgrim 
Fathers who had founded Plymouth nine years before 
were Separatists before they left England. Winthrop 
and his fellows cut loose from the mother church only 
when they found themselves, with a charter leaving their 
religious affairs in their own hands, in a new country 
with its ecclesiastical conditions all to be determined. 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 7 

The church government of Charles I, who three years 
later gave the Primacy to Archbishop Laud, was not 
the government they would naturally seek to establish. 
At about the time Laud came to the Primacy, the Rev. 
John Cotton emigrated from the old to the new Bos- 
ton. Two hundred and fifty years later his very-great- 
grandson Phillips Brooks said, " I thank him, as a 
Church-of-England man, as a man loving the Epis- 
copal Church with all my heart, I thank him for 
being a Puritan." So indeed may the later genera- 
tions turn with gratitude to the earlier. 

Through the first pages of the journal kept by 
Winthrop for nineteen years and now reprinted as the 
History of New England, one may gain many glimpses 
of the voyage across. When the emigrants think 
themselves pursued by hostile ships, they pray and, 
in a moment, are ready to fight with equal zeal. In 
a great storm, says Winthrop, " few of our people 
were sick, (except the women, who kept under 
hatches,) and there appeared no fear or dismayedness 
among them." The evil practices of a servant who 
tried to sell biscuits for his own unwarranted profit 
were punished after a gentle fashion of the day : his 
hands were tied to a bar above his head, a bag of 
stones was hung about his neck, and thus he stood 
for two hours. Besides the entries in his diary 
Winthrop wrote, during the voyage, a paper setting 
forth the course of conduct the colonists should pur- 
sue in order to make their enterprise truly a success. 
No sentence in the paper is more significant than this, 



BOSTON 



" We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our super- 
fluities, for the supply of others' necessities." To voy- 
agers whose leadership could thus express itself we are 
glad to read at last that the smell 
off the shore came like that of a 
garden. On June 12, 1630(0.8.), 
the ships, having sailed for seventy 
days more than the allotted six of 
modern travel, dropped their an- 
chors in the harbor of Salem. 

Here John Endicott, acting as 
governor under the Massachusetts 
Bay Company, had already been 
for two years at the head of a set- 
tlement now numbering three hun- 
dred souls. Across the bay, at 
Plymouth, the Pilgrims' colony 
had in nine years grown to about 
the same number. Smaller groups, 
from little settlements down to in- 
dividual families, were established 
at other points in the neighbor- 
hood. The coming of Winthrop 
and his followers was therefore an 
unprecedented event. With him 
and immediately afterwards, forming a part of his 
expedition, came seven or eight hundred persons. On 
the heels of these followed two or three hundred more, 
and after these in turn came quickly so many colonists 
that the total number with which his settlement virtu- 




' The Gift of Governor 

J NO Winthrop to y^ 
iT Church," still 
AMONG ITS Commun- 
ion Plate. 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 9 

ally began amounted to about two thousand. This 
was indeed the foundation for important state-building. 
Where so considerable a company should plant itself 
to the best advantage was of course the first great 
question to be settled. At Charlestown, across the 
river from the three-hilled promontory of Shawmut, 
which has been translated "living fountains," they 
found the beginnings of a town already made, and 
pitched upon the site for their abode. The midsum- 
mer heats of the place, however, were rendered the 
harder to endure by a lack of good fresh water. Many 
of the colonists, already weakened by the hardships of 
their voyage, fell sick and died. The early town records 
describe the people as " generally very loving and 
pitiful " toward each other during this baleful sum- 
mer, yet the place was not to be endured ; and when 
the Rev. William Blackstone, — 

"old Shawmut's pioneer. 
The parson on his brindled bull," — 

came to Winthrop and bade him welcome to his 
peninsula, where good water abounded, the greater 
'part of the community crossed the Charles and began 
vigorously to prepare themselves for the coming of 
winter. This final, short migration was made in 
September of 1630. 

As the settlers had looked across the river, the most 
conspicuous object in the landscape had been the 
three-pronged eminence of what is now Beacon Hill. 
The name of Trimoiintaine (now Tremont) had accord- 



lo BOSTON 

ingly been given to the place. In the very month of 
the departure from Charlestown it appears that the 
Court of Assistants, the first legislative body of the 
colony, had met and voted " that Trimountaine shall 
be called Boston." It was from Boston in old Eng- 
land that the Lady Arbella and her husband, Isaac 
Johnson, — neither of whom survived the early autumn, 

— had come; and Boston was the county seat of the 
Lincolnshire upon which many of the colonists looked 
back as their home. Yet the new town did not receive 
its name after the fashion of New Amsterdam, New 
York, or New Orleans. The new Boston was simply 
to be another Boston, new perhaps in a better sense 
than that implied by a capital letter. 

Certainly the colonists did not propose to leave 
their white and Indian neighbors in any uncertainty 
regarding their attitude toward life and conduct. One 
of their first actions — even before leaving Charlestown 

— was to summon from Mount Wollaston, now in the 
city of Ouincy, one Thomas Morton, who ruled over 
the settlement of Merrymount, and with his roistering 
followers presented anything but an edifying example 
of seriousness. His religious sympathies were with 
the unreformed Church of England. Apparently the 
reddest-lettered feast in his calendar was Mayday ; 
and if one wishes to know what revels took place 
round his Maypole, one may find pages of imaginative 
writing by Hawthorne and Motley which tell the 
story with enough of historical accuracy. Morton 
indeed represented the phases of English life most 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS ii 

objectionable to the Puritans who had left home in 
search of straighter, narrower paths, and it is not to 
be supposed that, with the power to suppress, they 
would tolerate him. Winthrop and his associates 
passed swift judgment that he was to be set in the 




From the Court Record of the Naming of Boston. 

bilboes and returned to England in a ship soon to 
sail ; his goods were to be seized to pay his passage, 
his debts, and the just dues of some Indians whose 
canoe he had stolen ; furthermore, for the general 
satisfaction of the Indians whom he had misused, his 
emptied house was to be burned to the ground in 
their presence. Except that he was held over for a 
ship sailing a little later than the one first determined 
upon, this sentence was carried out, with two additions 
not on the programme : Morton offered such personal 
resistance to his embarkation that he was hoisted on 
board the ship by means of a tackle, and the firing of 
his house was so carefully timed that the sight of it in 
flames was one of the last things upon which his eyes 
rested as he sailed out of Boston harbor. 

It is fair to add that when the faithful offended, the 
rigor of the law was in nowise omitted. It was an 
early order of the court that no one of the "Assistants" 



12 BOSTON 

— of whom the charter provided for eighteen as 
the persons next in authority to the Governor and 
Deputy Governor — should administer corporal pun- 
ishment unless a second Assistant were present. Sir 
Richard Saltonstall, ignoring this rule, whipped two 
persons ; whereupon a penalty of five pounds was 
promptly imposed upon him by his fellows. Even 
a more poetic justice was meted out to the carpenter 
who made the first stocks for the town, and rendered 
an exorbitant bill for his work. His immediate pun- 
ishment was to be cast into the pit he had digged — 
to sit in his own stocks, as an unexpected warning to 
the evildoers for whose ankles his handiwork was 
designed. 

This was the true Old Testament method of deal- 
ing with sinners, and it may well be doubted whether 
elsewhere outside of ancient Jewry, life and law have 
ever been ordered according to standards more strictly 
Biblical. Even the children were named on the as- 
sumption that not only — 

" Young Obadias, 
David, and Josias, 
All were pious," 

but that whenever a Christian name could be made 
Hebrew its bearer was the better for it. Judge Sewall 
expressed a direct inheritance of thought when near the 
end of the seventeenth century he recorded the wish 
for his infant daughter that she might be helped " to 
speak the Jews Language and to forget that of Ashdod." 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 13 

In the affairs of state one need not look far for the 
expression of a similar spirit. In 1636, three years 
after the coming of the Rev. John Cotton to Boston, 
he was asked to join with other ministers and some of 
the Magistrates — as the Assistants came to be called 
— in compiling a body of fundamental laws. For 
these he went to the book of Leviticus, and codifying 
its contents in a manner which he thought suited to 
the needs of Massachusetts, presented the result to the 
General Court. This code of " Moses, His Judi- 
cial " was not adopted, but the laws that were decided 
upon, the " Body of Liberties " drawn by Nathaniel 
Ward, the " Simple Cobbler of Aggawam," were of a 
character eminently Hebraic, and were based in many 
instances directly upon Old Testament texts. 

There is nothing to excite surprise in this Biblical 
foundation for civil affairs. The civil authorities showed 
their very dependence upon the ecclesiastical by look- 
ing to the clergy as to a court of higher appeal for 
counsel on doubtful matters. The Rev. John Cotton 
frequently used his Thursday lectures for giving 
almost authoritative advice on points at issue in the 
secular court. Within less than a year from the 
founding of the town the General Court passed an 
order limiting to members of the churches within the 
colony the right of voting conferred by the charter 
upon freemen. This excluded from citizenship an 
increasing number of excellent persons. By 1676 
five-sixths of the men in the colony had no vote on 
civil affairs. The mere fact that this condition could 



14 BOSTON 

maintain itself so long — and longer — speaks volumes 
for the power of ecclesiasticism. 

By what seems to us now a curious contradiction, 
the rites of marriage and burial in the earliest days of 
Boston were not performed bv the ministers, but by 
civil functionaries. The drum, not the bell, was used 
to summon the Puritan " meeting-going animal " — as 
John Adams defined the New England man — to the 
frequent religious exercises. These facts, together 
with the circumstance that the public reading of the 
Scriptures without exposition was not permitted, 
must, however, be laid rather to a zealous avoidance 
of all things savoring of ritual than to any unreadi- 
ness of the ministers to bear a part in affairs falling 
within or without their special province. The warp 
and woof of life in early Boston were essentially ec- 
clesiastical, and the first great disturbance of the peace 
arose, naturally enough, from a theological controversy. 

The so-called " Antinomian " episode was one of 
the significant events of the first decade in Boston, 
and as such deserves some special scrutiny. " Boston 
never wanted a good principle of rebellion in it," said 
Emerson, " from the planting until now." The rebel- 
lion led by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson was against a blind 
following of the ruling clergy. It has been well de- 
scribed as " New England's earliest protest against 
formulas." Its leader stand's head and shoulders 
above the transcendental women of all periods of 
Boston history in her success in putting the whole 
machinery of church and state out of running order. 




Z Qj 



? < 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 17 

In 1634 she had come from Lincohishire to Boston, 
in the footsteps of John Cotton, whom she ardently 
admired in both places. Her husband, William 
Hutchinson, was defined in his time as " a man of 
very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided 
by his wife." As these very words imply, she was 
directly his opposite. It is said that she was a cousin 
to John Dryden. In her new home it is easier to 
place her by saying that she lived where the " Old 
Corner Bookstore " has long stood in Boston, At 
the very first she distinguished herself from the crowd 
by her ministrations to the sick amongst her own sex. 
But, in addition to her practical qualities, she possessed 
mental and spiritual gifts of which she soon began to 
give evidence. When, within a year or two of her 
arrival, she organized a weekly meeting of women, 
it was thought that she was doing the town a good 
service. Her plan was to repeat the substance of Mr. 
Cotton's latest sermon, and by comment and inter- 
pretation to strengthen its impression. Mrs. Hutch- 
inson was a woman of shrewd intelligence and spiritual 
insight, but for her or any other woman to act as the 
champion of one minister, without pointing out the 
shortcomings of the others in the community, would 
have been almost superhuman. The ministers were 
used to being considered beyond reproach ; but here 
was the cleverest woman in town telling the fifty, 
eighty, or a hundred other women who came to her 
assemblies, that Mr. Cotton was the only Boston min- 
ister under the " Covenant of Grace." The others, 
c 



i8 BOSTON 

being under a " Covenant of Works," were not "sealed," 
were not " able ministers." Reduced to the terms of 
modern speech, and stated as favorably as possible, her 
central teaching was that the spirit of Christianity 
dwelling in a man's heart was the important thing for 
him, over and above any outward manifestations of 
piety. But the theological speech of the day involved 
Mrs. Hutchinson and those who disagreed with her 
in the most abstruse discussions of " sanctification," 
"justification," and scores of other questions which, 
for the mind of a modern layman, could have only an 
academic interest. To the seventeenth century Puri- 
tan, lay or clerical, the truth of these questions was 
amazingly vital ; and by causing all the women of the 
place to think and talk about her new doctrines, 
Mrs. Hutchinson, whether knowingly or not, took 
the surest means of making general trouble. 

In Boston itself it appears that most of the pious 
folk found themselves on her side of the dispute. In 
any event the good order of the churches was much 
disturbed through the restlessness of persons who left 
their own places of worship in search of congenial 
preaching. Winthrop himself has borne record that 
it became as common to distinguish between men by 
saying that they were under a Covenant of Grace, or 
of Works, as, in other countries, by calling them 
Protestants and Papists. In opposing the new teach- 
ings Winthrop had the support of the Rev. John 
Wilson, his fellow-emigrant, of the ministers in the 
outlying towns, and of an active minority of the laity 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 19 

in Boston. In support of Anne Hutchinson the most 
conspicuous lay figure — so to call him — was Sir 
Harry Vane, " young in years, but in sage counsel 
old," of whom Milton further wrote, surely without 
recalling the part he played in the little Boston 
tempest, — 

" on thy firm hand Religion leans 
In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son." 

Under his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in 
London are the less flattering words, "He was of a 
turbulent and visionary temperament," — possibly a 
truer definition. 

In less than eight months after his arrival in Boston 
in the autumn of 1635, he was elected to the governor- 
ship, when he was but twenty-four years old. Young 
as the colony was, it had lived long enough to have 
traditions — and consequently a conservative and an 
" advanced " element. Winthrop was the natural 
leader of the one, and Vane of the other, in matters 
relating both to the state and to the church. On the 
day after Vane's election the Rev. John Wheelwright, 
Anne Hutchinson's brother-in-law, a minister of great 
independence, landed in Boston. It was not long be- 
fore Mrs. Hutchinson did him the doubtful kindness 
of placing him beside Cotton as an " able " minister, 
distinguished, like Cotton, from the rest as a preacher 
of the Covenant of Grace. 

Here then were the rival factions provided with 
powerful champions. To us of this later day the 



20 BOSTON 

strangest thing about the conflict into which they cast 
themselves, is that persons of so great intellectual 
force could have looked upon the points at issue as 
worthy of the zeal with which the contest was waged. 
But precisely therein lies the significance of the con- 
troversy. The mere facts of its cause and its virulence 
go far to explain the early New Englander, and to re- 
move the need of extended comment in this place. 
It would be superfluous to follow out all the details of 
charges and countercharges, hearings, Synod, and trials. 
The victory of the conservative party, the triumph of 
conformity to the new-world rule of " lord-brethren," 
is the upshot of the story. First Vane, having be- 
trayed his youth by using his governorship for a 
boyish furtherance of party issues, comes up for re- 
election, and is defeated — but only after the dignified 
Wilson climbs a tree to harangue the voters on behalf 
of Winthrop. Then a Synod declares that the unsafe 
heretical opinions which have gained currency mount 
to the number of eighty-two, exclusive of nine "un- 
wholesome expressions." It is no wonder that Haw- 
thorne, in his Grand/ cither s Chair ^ permits the listening 
boy to observe, " If they had eighty-two wrong opinions, 
I don't see how they could have any right ones." The 
Synod having done its work, the General Court purges 
itself of " Antinomian " members, and proceeds to 
banish Wheelwright. Last of all comes the disgrace- 
ful trial of Ann? Hutchinson herself The Court, in 
spite of its brow-beating methods, fails to convict her 
on the original charge of speaking ill of the ministers, 




Sir Henry Vane. 
Statue by Frederick MacMonnies, in the Boston Public Library. 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 23 

and attains its triumph only when she gives way to the 
exercise of her wholly intolerable gift of prophecy, and 
foretells ruin for her judges and their posterity. This 
is sufficient. The state decrees her banishment, and 
after an ecclesiastical trial her enemy Wilson pro- 
nounces this sentence of excommunication : " There- 
fore in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the 
name of the church, I do not only pronounce you 
worthy to be cast out, but I do cast you out ; and in 
the name of Christ 1 do deliver you up to Satan, that 
you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce and 
to lie ; and I do account you from this time forth to 
be a Heathen and a Publican, and so to be held of all 
the Brethren and Sisters of this congregation and of 
others : therefore I command you in the name of 
Christ Jesus and of this church as a Leper to withdraw 
yourself out of this congregation." 

The unfortunate Leper, Heathen, and Publican, 
delivered over to Satan to learn better manners, be- 
took herself to Rhode Island, and thence to Man- 
hattan Island, where with nearly all her family she 
was murdered by Indians. Against all the inhuman 
items of her story, it is refreshing to place the words 
which her husband — " mild " as he may have been — 
spoke to the three delegates of the Boston church 
who followed them into their exile to look into the 
state of religious affairs in Rhode Island, " Mr. 
Hutchinson told us," the delegates reported, " he was 
more nearly tied to his wife than to the church; he 
thought her to be a dear saint and servant of God." 



24 BOSTON 

In the midst of the Antinomian controversy, two 
remarkable orders were enacted by the legislature. 
One of them called upon seventy-five persons — 
fifty-eight of them residents of Boston — to deliver 
up whatever arms and ammunition they might possess. 
Evidently the authorities regarded the doctrines and 
the possible actions of the " Antinomians " as equally 
dangerous. The second law put into effect the feeling 
which Nathaniel Ward, in the next decade, put into 
words when he proclaimed " to the world, in the name 
of our Colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Ana- 
baptists, and other enthusiasts, shall have free Liberty 
to keep away from us, and such as will come to be 
gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better." The 
law, supported by Winthrop and opposed by Vane, 
imposed a heavy fine upon any citizen who, without 
permission of the authorities, should receive into his 
house a stranger intending to remain in the place, or 
should rent him land or dwelling-house. Friends of 
Wheelwright and relatives of the Hutchinsons were 
known to be on the way when this remarkable "alien 
law" was adopted. Its prompt enforcement on their 
arrival made them continue their search for a place 
of settlement, and established for a time a wholly 
anomalous standard for citizenship in Massachusetts. 
In this way could a religious dissension make its mark 
on the secular legislation of the period. 

From even smaller beginnings, in 1636, arose a 
dispute which had for its outcome, in 1644, the 
division of the legislative body into an upper and 



FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS 25 

lower house. The question was that of the owner- 
ship of a stray pig, claimed respectively by a poor 
Mrs. Sherman and by one Robert Keayne, the first 
captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery 
Company, which took its title in Boston from the 
organization of the same name, 

of which Captain Keayne had H^CvHr f^COAfnt^ 
been a member in London. The 

church decided first in favor of the captain. Then 
the widow carried the case to the courts, where it gath- 
ered importance, assumed the aspect of a political 
question between the aristocratic and the democratic 
class, and took a prominent place in the discussions 
of the General Court for more than a year. The 
important result of the conflict was that the " Assist- 
ants " or Magistrates of the Company, and the dele- 
gates from the towns, who had sat together as a single 
body, were divided into two houses, of which each 
could veto the proceedings of the other. " Mrs. 
Sherman's pig," said a public speaker some two 
hundred years later, " was the origin of the present 
Senate," and he hoped " the members of it would not 
disgrace their progenitor." The infant colony which 
within a few years passed an " alien law " excluding 
Antinomians, and mended its machinery of gov- 
ernment shown to be imperfect through the agency 
of a poor woman's pig, was certainly a settlement of 
which individual and unusual things were fairly to 
be expected. 



II 



COLONIAL BOSTON 




A I AO the person of exact mind, 



demanding frequent periods 
of division in the history of Bos- 
ton, the interval between the 
founding of the town in 1630 
;"^ r^S^^^C ^^^ ^^^ withdrawal of the charter 
fe}S0^3^'Si^ of King Charles I in 1684 must 
Royal Arms from the seem unduly long. But it was 

Council Chamhkr of ,1 • j ^ l- 1 1 j 

THE OLD STATE-HOUSE, ^his sccottd cvent which marked 
Now in Trinity Church, the first inevitable turning-point 

SLjohn.N.B. jj^ ^^^ ^Q^^gg ^f ^^^•j.g^ ^^^ 

much it meant to the men of the Puritan town, how 
steadily and sturdily they opposed the change, it is 
hard for us who take our forms of government almost 
as matters of course, to realize. To tell the whole 
story of the contest on this point between colonists 
and crown would be to write a separate volume. Here 
it will suffice to touch upon the earlier and the con- 
cluding stages of the conflict, and roughly following 
the years that fell between, to note a few of the more 
significant circumstances not immediately related to the 
scheme of government. 

Three years after Thomas Morton's summary de- 
portation from Boston, he and others, backed by men 

26 



COLONIAL BOSTON 27 

of consequence with rights of their own at stake in 
New England, tried in vain to bring the Privy Coun- 
cil to check the progress of the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony. Still more serious was the threatening of 
disaster when, later in the same year, 1633, Laud be- 
came Archbishop of Canterbury. In and out of Eng- 
land the Puritan subjects of Great Britain had little to 
expect in the way of favors. It came to be thought 
that to Boston especially malcontents, civil and ecclesi- 
astical, were betaking themselves in dangerous num- 
bers. A few months after Laud's accession some 
ships, ready to sail for New England and waiting in 
the Thames, were stayed by an Order of Council. 
Masters and freighters were called to appear before the 
authorities, and the ships were permitted to go their 
way only after the masters pledged themselves to the 
use of the Book of Common Prayer, morning and 
evening during the voyage, and all the emigrants took 
the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. These meas- 
ures were less alarming, however, than the Council's 
demand upon Mr. Matthew Cradock, Winthrop's 
only predecessor in the chief office of the company, 
for the original letters-patent which the emigrants of 
1630 had borne away with them. 

If the King did not realize what a large measure of 
self-government he had granted a few of his subjects 
through the Massachusetts charter, the possessors of it 
were fully awake to their advantage. They knew well 
the number of points counted in law by actual posses- 
sion, and, apparently with good reason, had no fear 



28 BOSTON 

that the government could curtail their liberties by any 
reference to the copy of their precious document which 
must have existed in the public archives. Of their 
taking the charter to Massachusetts with them, Judge 
Story has said, " The boldness of the step is not more 
striking than the silent acquiescence of the King in per- 
mitting it to take place." Unless one prefers to read 
in the charter itself a tacit permission of such a course, 
the boldness and the acquiescence may both be taken 
as evidence of the laxity of administration under the 
second Stuart king. But when a letter from Cradock 
in London came to the Governor and Assistants in 
Boston, asking them to send home the charter de- 
manded by the Privy Council, it became apparent that 
firmness must be practised, at least on one side of the 
Atlantic. The colonists at once began to show it in a 
definite Fabian policy of procrastination. 

To this first demand they sent back word that the 
General Court would not meet for some months, and 
that nothing could be done without its sanction. The 
next alarming piece of news in Boston was that a gen- 
eral governor would soon come over to manage all the 
American colonies, and that all their charters must be 
examined by a formidable Commission in England 
with Laud at its head. When the clergy conferred with 
the Governor and Assistants about the best means 
of meeting this danger they decided between them not 
to accept the general governor " but defend our law- 
ful possessions if we were able; otherwise to avoid or 
protract." In the meantime they had taken the first 




-"H"— fi- 




*i^% 






A Bit of Fort Independence. 
(Formerly Castle Island.) 



COLONIAL BOSTON 31 

steps toward fortifying Castle Island in the harbor. 
When the next General Court met in March of 1635, 
it ordered a continuance of this martial work, even to 
the pressing of men for the purpose, and provided for 
warning the country of any danger by means of a 
signal on Centry, or, as it was thenceforth to be called. 
Beacon Hill, Bullets were created fiat money, at the 
value of a farthing each. 

Ready as the rulers and the people were to fight, if 
occasion should arise, the true keynote of their policy 
was summed up in the phrase " to avoid or protract." 
In the years immediately following, opportunities were 
not wanting for the ingenious practice of this policy. 
How skilfully Winthrop himself could use it, is per- 
haps best shown in his letter of September, 1638, mak- 
ing humble supplication to the Lords Commissioners 
of Foreign Plantations " that this poor plantation which 
hath found more favour from God than many others, 
may not find less favour from your Lordships." In the 
progress of events more powerful forces even than the 
colonists' own worldly wisdom were fighting for them 
in England itself. The crown, with Cromwell and all 
his engines striking more fiercely at it every day, was 
occupied with sufiiciently puzzling problems at home. 
When its enemies, who were, of course, the friends of 
the New England Puritans, won the ascendency, there 
was nothing to prevent a firmer rooting of all the 
liberties which had knit themselves into the Massa- 
chusetts soil with the planting of Boston. And while 
this process was going forward, the tree was putting 



32 BOSTON 

forth the leaves and branches which fixed its outward 
form for many years to come. 

In how much of this John Winthrop bore an im- 
portant personal part, the most casual scrutiny of the 
early years in Boston will show. Between 1630 and 
his death in 1649 he was twelve times Governor, 
thrice Deputy Governor, and, for the few years not 
devoted to these offices, head of the Board of Assist- 
ants. Through all this time he served Boston herself 
as the chief of her selectmen and in other capacities. 
It was a simple standard of living which his own 
household set for his fellow-townsmen. From the 
steps of his house on Washington Street, opposite the 
foot of School Street, his wife thought it no shame to 
carry her pail for water to the source which gave Spring 
Lane its name. Fearing an abuse of the custom of 
drinking toasts, Winthrop banished it from his own 
table, and found, as he hoped, that his example was 
followed in other houses. His view of the commu- 
nity at large was that " the best part is always the least, 
and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." 
In spite of this austere opinion he did not escape 
accusations of undue lenity and laxity. Once when he 
was superseded in the governorship he was even called 
upon for his accounts ; but it was an easy matter to 
show that his expenditures for the colony had exceeded 
his receipts from it by X1200. With the Deputy 
Governor, Dudley, his relations were sometimes peril- 
ously strained. Yet there could have been little dan- 
ger of a permanent alienation of the two friends when 



COLONIAL BOSTON 33 

Winthrop could return a peculiarly irritating letter 
with no comment beyond " I am unwilling to keep 
such an occasion of provocation by me." To this 
Dudley answered, — as well he might, — " Your over- 
coming yourself has overcome me." When all the 
authorities of Boston were for sending the trouble- 
some Roger Williams back to England, it was the pri- 
vate advice of Winthrop which landed him safe on the 
shores of Narragansett Bay. His charity, indeed, lived 
to the very end of his own life — for when to his 
death-bed Dudley brought kn order for the banish- 
ment of a heterodox person, and asked for Governor 
Winthrop's signature, the good man withheld his hand, 
saying he had done too much of that work already. 
Mercy and justice were so truly blended in his char- 
acter that Hawthorne could write of him with perfect 
truth as " a man by whom the innocent and the guilty 
might alike desire to be judged; the first confiding in 
his integrity and wisdom, the latter hoping in his mild- 
ness," The seventeenth-century Boston had abun- 
dant reason to be thankful that its first citizen of the 
chief importance was such an one as Winthrop. The 
subtler effects of his personal headship need not be 
traced. But let us note a few of the good undertakings 
in which, before his death in 1649, his hand was felt. 

One of the first of these enterprises was the purchase 
of Boston Common. In 1633 the town had set aside 
fifty acres of land, near the house of William Black- 
stone, — which stood in a six-acre lot bounded in part 
by the present lines of Beacon, Spruce, and Pinckney 



34 



BOSTON 



streets and the ancient border of the Charles River, — 
for this earHest settler " to enjoy forever." But his 
enjoyment had a shorter date than the " lord-brethren " 
of Boston — from whom he proceeded to flee as he 
had fled from " lord-bishops " in England — could 




Tremont Street and the Common, about 1800. 

have foreseen. In 1634 he relinquished all his rights 
in the peninsula, excepting the six acres about his 
house, for ;^30. The money for the purchase was 
raised by a tax on all the householders, who con- 
tributed sums from six shillings upward. Winthrop 
was at the head of those who represented the town in 
the transaction. Six vears later, in 1640, it was agreed 
that " there shall be no land granted either for house- 
plot or garden to any person " out of the space which 
with its boundaries practically unchanged has been 
the scene of many historic dramas, from tragedy to 
comedy, and is still, perhaps, the most characteristic 
bit in the landscape of Boston. In a wider range of 
history than that which comprises the records of this 



COLONIAL BOSTON 3s 

single city, a more profitable investment of one hun- 
dred and fifty dollars would be difficult to find. 

To represent the continuity of things in Boston 
there is no other such tangible object as the Com- 
mon ; yet the beginning of the story of free schools 
carries us back into the earliest days of Winthrop's 
leadership of affairs. The antique name of Philemon 
Pormort (or Pormont) appears even in the records 
of 1633 as "school-master for the teaching and 
nourtering of children with us." In 1636 the chief 
persons of the place set themselves down as sub- 
scribers, in amounts from 4J-. to J^io, "towards the 
maintenance of free schoolmaster." From the school 
thus provided for, the Boston Latin School traces 
direct descent. Its unbroken record is bright with 
the names of boys preparing for manhood of the 
highest local and national significance. 

This prompt recognition of the importance of free 
and universal education was inevitable in such a com- 
munity as that of early Boston. Between 1630 and 
1647, ^^ h^s been estimated, nearly one hundred Uni- 
versity men came from England to the Massachusetts 
Bay Colony. Forty or fifty were here by 1639, ^^^'^ 
of those it is said that one-half established themselves 
within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. Though 
many of them were of the clergy, a fair share of the 
number belonged to the laity. Mr. Henry Cabot 
Lodge has shrewdly pointed out the difficulties they 
might well have foreseen in trving to nourish their 
conflicting principles of church, state, and education 



1,6 BOSTON 

side by side. But fortunately they did not look so 
far ahead as to realize that of the three principles, the 
one which they cherished most tenderly, the principle 
of theocracy, would be the surest to give place to the 
free spirit involved in untrammelled learning. In 1636 
they founded Harvard College, primarily for the train- 
ing of Christian ministers for Indians and whites. In 
1642 Winthrop doubtless rejoiced to record in his 
diary, " Nine bachelors commenced at Cambridge." 
With them "commenced" an influence of incalculable 
moment in fixing the Boston temper of mind through 
the succeeding generations. But this Harvard College 
— "first flower of their wilderness" — belonged to 
Boston only as other influences which have spread them- 
selves through Massachusetts and all the states belonged 
to Boston ; and here this word about it must sufiice. 

Another institution of far more than local impor- 
tance was the New England Confederacv — or, to use 
its own name for itself, " The United Colonies of New 
England." The four colonies of Massachusetts Bay, 
Plymouth, Hartford, and New Haven had, in com- 
mon, too much, both of purpose and of need, to 
continue long in utter independence of one another. 
Accordingly, in 1643, they achieved a somewhat loose 
union " for preserving and propagating the truth and 
liberties of the Gospel, and for their own mutual safety 
and welfare." More than for anything which the 
league, as such, accomplished, it has its historic inter- 
est in its foreshadowing of our own federal scheme 
of government. A detailed study of its Articles would 



COLONIAL BOSTON 37 

show that in more than one particular this early instru- 
ment of colonial federation might have served as a 
model with those who framed the union of our states. 
From 1643 ^o 1684, only a short time before the 
coming of Andros as governor of all New England, 
the Confederacy maintained its existence. Boston 
from the first was the capital town, in fact if not 
in name, of the territory thus bound together ; and in 
its citizens the constant spectacle of this simple work- 
ing machinery of union may well have brought into 
being something like a national consciousness. 

The Confederacy was but six years old when Win- 
throp, his good work well done, quitted the scene. 
To understand the contrast between the place as he 
found it and as he left it, we cannot do better than 
to turn to a frequently quoted passage in Johnson's 
Wonder -Working Providence describing the town in 
1650. When the colonists landed, "the hideous 
thickets in this place were such that Wolfes & Beares 
nurst up their young from the eyes of all beholders, 
in those very places where the streets are full of Girles 
& Boys sporting up & downe, with a continual con- 
course, of people." Of the building which before 1650 
had taken place on the shore of the bay, Johnson says, 
" The chiefe Edifice of this City-like Towne is crowded 
on the Sea-bankes, and wharfed out with great in- 
dustry & cost, the buildings beautiful & large, some 
fairely set forth with Brick, Tile, Stone, & Slate, whose 
continuall inlargement presages some sumptuous City." 
Twenty years had wrought a change indeed from the 



38 BOSTON 

appearance of the barren promontory which an earlier 
traveller had been able to commend in at least these 
words : " It being a necke and bare of wood : they 
are not troubled with three great annoyances of 
Woolves, Rattle-snakes, and Musketoes." Possibly 
Johnson overpopulated his hideous thickets. 

But the treeless promontory in 1650 was of course 
immeasurably nearer its primeval form than anything 
we can trace in its outlines to-day. The word peninsula 
describes it less promptly to our ears than the English 
equivalent — "almost an island," with a strong empha- 
sis on the qualifying term. Where Washington Street 
now winds its way north and south of Dover Street, 
" the Neck," even up to the century just past, stretched 
across broad tidal waters to connect Boston with Rox- 
bury. As the wayfarer across this strip of land looked 
toward Boston, he saw something very different from 
the comparatively flat expanse now covered by the 
main city. In addition to the three-peaked hill of 
Trimountaine, other eminences rose less conspicuous. 
Where Fort Hill Square is now surrounded by level 
streets of trade, Fort Hill itself appeared. Where 
Copp's Hill Burying-ground is now more noticeable 
for its graves than for any elevation in the landscape, 
the height which took its earlier name of Windmill 
Hill from the structure on its summit rose abruptly 
from the water. Under all these hills and skirting the 
harbor, a shore-line even more unlike that of the 
present day fixed the seaward boundary of the town. 
Reaching far into districts now covered by business 



COLONIAL BOSTON 



39 



buildings, tenement-houses, and the residences of the 
better sort, deep coves extended into the land. From 
time to time, as the generations have come and gone, 
the " continual! inlargement " which presaged " some 
sumptuous City" has been 
carried forward by the cutting 
down of the hills and the fill- 
ing up of the waters with the 
dry land thus placed at the dis- 
posal of man. During the 
seventeenth century, the early 
saints, of whom Emerson re- 
ported the saying that " they 
had to hold on to the huckle- 
berry bushes to hinder them- 
selves from being translated," 
had work enough in planting 
their houses where the huckle- 
berries had grown. 

But while they were so 
doing they abated in no wise 
their activities as saints. Non- 
conformists as they had been 
in England, they continued to 
exact the strictest conformity 
to their own ecclesiastical methods. The banishment 
of Roger Williams and the severity against Quakers 
were among the most patent evidences of this rigidity 
of rule. These instances, however, might be held up 
to show no less clearly the inextricable tangling of civil 




Roger Williams. 

Statue by Franklin Simmons, at 
Providence, R.I. 



40 BOSTON 

and ecclesiastical affairs. Williams was banished as a 
disturber rather of the secular than of the religious 
peace, because he had " broached and divulged new and 
dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates, 
as also writ letters of defamation, both of the magis- 
trates and churches here." This sentence of banish- 
ment, by the way, was rescinded in 1676, although the 
fact did not become generally known until 1900, when 
certain enthusiasts for freedom of opinion sought to 
have the decree removed from the Massachusetts rec- 
ords. In Rhode Island, whither Roger Williams had 
gone, as Cotton Mather said, with "a wind-mill in his 
head," and where, according to the same authority any- 
body who had lost a conscience might find one to suit 
him, the Quakers, too, sought refuge. Regarding 
them solely as offenders against civil order, the Puritans 
certainly had a just quarrel with the religious fanatics 
who walked naked through the public streets, appeared 
in the churches in sackcloth and ashes, with blackened 
faces, and clashed empty bottles together, calling down 
the wrath of heaven upon the people. Such conduct 
as this deserved some punishment, but the rancorous 
infliction of stripes, fines, banishment, and threats of 
death was something to shift one's sympathy quickly 
from the persecutors to the persecuted. The threat 
of execution in store for these violent precursors of 
the gentle folk we know as Friends was reserved for 
those who insisted upon returning from banishment. 
The magistrates may have "desired their lives absent 
rather than their deaths present " ; but three men and 



COLONIAL BOSTON 41 

a woman courted death at the hands of the Boston 
magistrates, and won it. 

Their executions took place between 1659 and 1661. 
To witness the hanging of Marmaduke Stevenson and 
WilHam Robinson, who in 1659 were marched to the 
gallows behind drums which drowned their voices 
whenever they tried to speak, so many persons had 
thronged to the Common from the North End that, 
as they returned home, the drawbridge across the 
marsh which made the North End practically an 
island broke down beneath their weight. On the 
Common these sight-seers had heard the Rev. John 
Wilson railing against the culprits to the last, and had 
witnessed the dramatic release of a Quakeress, Mary 
Dyer, condemned to die with the men. The hang- 
man's rope was already passed round her neck when 
the urgent appeal of her son won her the alternative 
sentence of banishment from the colony; but in less 
than a year she returned, and paid the postponed 
penalty of death. In March of 1661, the fourth vic- 
tim, one Leddra, suffered the same punishment. In 
the ground of the Common, where these misbelievers 
died, their bodies were buried. At a later and safer 
day, long after Shattuck the Salem Quaker in 1661 
had brought to Governor Endicott King Charles's 
order to have all Quakers awaiting punishment sent 
to England for trial, the Boston Quakers asked per- 
mission to put a paling round the four graves on the 
Common. This was held to be "very inconvenient," 
and nothing beyond the enclosure of a few feet of 



42 BOSTON 

ground with boards was permitted. By this time, 
1685, the Quakers were firmly enough established to 
have had a regular place of worship for seven years; 
and before the end of the century they built for their 
own use in Brattle Street the first brick meeting-house 
in Boston. Yet it may be added that a Quaker trav- 
eller, visiting Boston as late as 1693, reported "the 
barbarous and unchristian-like welcome " he received. 
" ' O ! what a pity it was,' said one, ' that all of your 
society were not hanged with the other four.' " Appar- 
ently there were lessons both of tolerance and of good 
manners to be learned in Boston. 

The Quaker disturbance, acute though it was, had 
at least the virtue of being short-lived. Its four 
victims who came to the gallows died within the space 
of three years. Between the first and the last execu- 
tion for witchcraft in Boston forty years elapsed. 
The first of all came during Winthrop's governorship, 
in 1648. Within the next eight years two more lives 
were sacrificed to the strangest delusion which ever 
brought the powers of darkness and the fate of mortals 
together. For more than thirty years from that time, 
no other victim came to the Boston scaffold. Soon 
after Goody Glover was executed in 1688, the hideous 
history of the witchcraft mania in New England passed, 
happily for Boston, into the history of Salem. With 
it, unhappily for Boston, passed such Boston names as 
those of Cotton Mather and of Samuel Sewall who for 
one had the grace, when the harm was done, to stand 
up in meeting of his own free will and " take the 



COLONIAL BOSTON 43 

blame and shame of it." To the credit of Boston 
itself it should be said that "spectral evidence" was 
not accepted, as in the Salem trials, against persons 
accused of witchcraft ; and that the method of treating 
the two notable cases of Mercy Short and Margaret 
Rule by the sole spiritual weapon of prayer was that 
which came to distinguish the Boston from the Salem 
mode of procedure. But even if the story of New 
England witchcraft were to be retold in the pages of 
this book, its chief events belong to a later time than 
that with which the present chapter deals. Here we 
may leave the matter in the light of a few figures. It 
has been estimated that during the years of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries in which the minds 
of men were inflamed against witches and witchcraft, 
the executions in Germany numbered one hundred 
thousand, in France seventy-five thousand, and in 
Great Britain thirty thousand. The other countries 
of Europe contributed their proportionate shares. 
Against these may be set the thirty-two victims of 
New England, four of whom were provided by the 
town of Boston. The wonder is not that we hear so 
much of the early American witch-killers, but that so 
little is said about their European forerunners and 
contemporaries. 

Upon the whole matter of early New England 
harshness, so to call it, we are prone to look through 
" near " rather than " far " glasses. We recoil with 
horror from the thought of a scarlet letter A, or the 
D hung for a year round the neck of a drunkard. 



44 BOSTON 

The punishment of one Captain Kemble who had to 
sit for two hours in the stocks for kissing his wife 
pubHcly on the Sabbath Day, when he first saw her 
after an absence of three years, has its droll no less 
than its painful aspect. The idea of bringing con- 
demned criminals to divine service on Sunday and to 
the Thursday Lecture for exposure to a visual appli- 
cation of text and sermon in a crowded meeting-house 
provokes both sympathy and repugnance. We shud- 
der at the list of twelve offences punishable under 
the Massachusetts " Bodv of Liberties " by death ; 
but we forget that in England at the same time a 
sinner might lose his life by committing any one of 
a hundred and fifty sins. In point of austerity in ad- 
ministering justice, the seventeenth-century Bostonian 
was, indeed, very much a man of his time — with 
contemporary faults and virtues, blended in special 
proportions but drawn from the general supply of 
good and ill. In Hawthorne's characterization ol 
Endicott, " who would stand with his drawn sword at 
the gate of heaven, and resist to the death all pilgrims 
thither, except they travelled his own path," we find a 
memorable suggestion of the chief and distinguishing 
fault, if such it be, of the race of New England 
Puritans. 

Men of their time in most respects, the Boston 
Puritans, as colonists, stood in advance of it. If their 
provision for free education showed the guidance of an 
enlightened few, the record of their printing, buying, 
and reading of books tells something of the intelligent 




John Eliot preaching to the Indians. 
Mural Painting by Henry O. Walker, in the State-house. 



COLONIAL BOSTON 47 

many. For a long time, to be sure, the work of 
printing, begun in Cambridge in 1639, ^^^ afterwards 
confined by law to that place, was not taken up in 
Boston itself. It was not until 1674 that John Foster 
displayed his " Sign of a Dove " and became the first 
Boston printer. Before the loss of the charter Boston 
and Cambridge together printed some three hundred 
publications, of which, of course, the greater number 
were theological. But as early as 1652 Hezekiah 
Usher was a bookseller in the town. By 1673 there 
was a public library to which John Oxenbridge could 
bequeath his books — as John Harvard and John 
Winthrop had earlier left theirs to the library of 
the college. When Dunton, a London bookseller, 
brought over an assortment of books for sale in 
1685, he found five dealers already established in the 
place. All these would be dry facts were they not 
significant of an intellectual activity not usually found 
in seventeenth-century colonies. Since the men of 
Boston began so promptly to provide themselves with 
books, what wonder that their Beacon Hill has in 
later years appeared as 

"a. tall mountain, citied to the top. 
Crowded with culture " ? 

While books were extending the inner vision, the 
powerful agency of commerce was at its work of 
broadening the outward horizon. A lively trade with 
other parts of New England, with all the more south- 
erly colonies, and with the Frenchmen to the north, 



48 BOSTON 

carried Boston boats and Boston men far from their 
own wharves. In the French colonies Boston, or 
Baston, as the word came to be written, was used in 
so broad a sense that the men of all Massachusetts, 
indeed the English colonists in general, found them- 
selves described as " Bostonnais." It may be through 
a survival of this very usage that the Canadians and 
Indians of the Pacific coast have defined Americans as 
Bostons up to our own day. 

It were well if some record of the names which the 
Indians of eastern Massachusetts called the men of 
early Boston could be unearthed. In the absence 
of Indian historians we have to be content with a 
one-sided story. There is every evidence that the 
original intentions of the colonists with regard to the 
Indians were eminently Christian. In the precious 
charter itself the colonists were counted upon to 
" winne and incite the natives of that country to the 
knowledge and obedience of the only true God and 
Saviour of mankind and the christian faith, which is 
our royall intention and the adventurers free profes- 
sion is the principall end of this plantation." In spite 
of this profession there seems to be a reasonable doubt 
whether so many Englishmen would have come to the 
new world at all but for their belief that a pestilence 
had recently taken a large number of the red men out 
of their way. They doubtless believed, moreover, 
that the Christian religion would recommend itself 
more promptly and generally to the savages. If 
there had been more white men like the " Apostle " 



COLONIAL BOSTON 49 

John Eliot of Roxbury, who estabHshed at Natick 
his village of "praying Indians," — a shining example 
of the best missionary work, — the performances of the 
white men might have tallied better with their inten- 
tions. 

As it was, Boston had to send its quota of men to a 
Pequot war in Connecticut before the town was seven 
years old. When the Indians refused to turn from 
certain ignorance to the uncertain choice between 
the Calvinist heaven or hell, the colonists had little 
difficulty in persuading themselves that " the enemies 
of the Puritans" — in the words of Dr. George E. 
Ellis — " were the enemies of God." The new coun- 
try could not become God's country until the devil's 
people were removed from it ; and since God's work 
could not be done through conversion, it must be 
wrought by the sword. 

King Philip's War, culminating in 1676, was the 
inevitable result of these conditions. Before its out- 
break, Philip told the Apostle Eliot that he cared no 
more for his religion than for the apostolic coat- 
button he held in his fingers — and earned for him- 
self Cotton Mather's epithet of a " blasphemous 
Leviathan." When the Indian chieftain lay dead 
at Mount Hope he was no more to Captain Benjamin 
Church, who led the English against him, than " a 
doleful, great, naked, dirty beast." Yet the war 
which he had waged had threatened the very con- 
tinuance of the whites in New England. Even at 
the time it was estimated that if he had had the help 



50 



BOSTON 



of the 3000 Indians who had submitted in greater and 
less degree to the influences of civiHzation, the EngHsh 
would have been exterminated. Within three hours 
of the first call to arms Boston mustered no men 

to go forth into the Plymouth colony and Rhode 
Island where the conflict chiefly raged. Throughout 
the war she bore her part with all the valor which was 
needed even against foes who could be terrified by the 
aspect of one soldier in the armor he had worn under 
Cromwell, or of another who hung his wig on a tree 
that he might fight more coolly, but appeared to the 
Indians as a marvellous creature who stood in no need 
of scalping. With all their might the men of Boston 
helped to keep King Philip's War at a safe distance 
from their wives and children, and fighting, as they 
thought, for God and the church, bore themselves like 
true members of the church militant. 

Since the Puritan church was militant, so, of course, 
was its other half, the state. Immediately before and 
after King Philip's War its conflict was with the 
crown. We have already seen how the supremacy of 
Cromwell put a stop to the bout of long- armed fencing 
over the charter. More than this, the Massachusetts 
colony had taken the opportunity to intrench itself 
almost as an independent state. When Cromwell's 



COLONIAL BOSTON 



51 



Navigation Act proved disadvantageous to the colony, 
the colony disregarded it ; and Cromwell, friendly to 
the Puritans and busy with his enemies, made no ob- 
jection. When the colony thought it needed money 
of its own, it took the self-sufficient step, in 1652, of 
setting up its own coinage. " No other colony," says 
Hutchinson, " ever presumed to coin any metal into 
money. It must be considered that at this time there 
was no king in Israel." The charter under which such 
courses were even possible was obviously growing less 
and less a thing to be surrendered. 

After a king had returned to Israel, and the second 
Charles came to his own in 1660, he is said to have 
looked at one of the pine tree shillings, and to have mis- 
taken John Hull's famous mintage for a well-meaning 
reproduction of the royal oak. Still more flattering to 
kingly pride may have been the Address which came to 
him promptly from Boston. The colonists called them- 
selves " your poor Mephibo- 
sheths." Trusting " that he 
knoweth the hearts of exiles, 
who himself hath been an 
exile," they declared humbly, 
yet elaborately enough, that 
"the aspect of majesty thus 
extraordinarily circumstanced 
influenceth and animateth 
exanimated outcasts," and prayed for his royal grace. 
But with this attitude of the colonists came also the 
opportunity of their enemies — neither few nor feeble 




King Philip's Bowl. 

In possession of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society. 



52 



BOSTON 




— to make complaints. The royal oak on the shilling 
was shown to be an unwarranted pine tree ; the harbor- 
ing of the regicides GofFe and Whalley, and the over- 
stepping of various chartered rights, were set forth in 
their most disloyal significance. Through agents sent 
to England from Boston, the King gave orders looking 
toward a real extension of civil and religious libertv, 
and they were grudgingly obeyed. 
Then, in 1 664, the crown despatched 
four Commissioners to look into 
the affairs of all the New England 
colonies. In Connecticut, Rhode 
Island, and Plymouth they were 
satisfactorily received. In Boston 
it was different. The Commission- 
ers and the Court, representing the 
colony, soon found themselves in a 
snarl. At the end of a month the 
Commissioners asked, " Do you 
acknowledge his Majesty's Com- 
mission to be of full force to all 
the intents and purposes therein 
contained ? " And the Court replied, "We humbly 
conceive it is beyond our line to declare our sense of 
the power, intent, or purpose of your Commission. It 
is enough for us to acquaint you what we conceive is 
granted to us by his Majesty's royal charter. If you 
rest not satisfied with our former answer, it is our 
trouble, but we hope it is not our fault." The Com- 
missioners saw the futility of further parleying and 



^^^f^^J^r^r:,,^ 




Pine Tree Shillings. 



COLONIAL BOSTON S3 

departed. Two years later the King called upon the 
colony to send four or five persons to England for a 
conference upon the vexed questions. But when the 
letter bearing these instructions came without direction 
or seal, the Court made the most of this omission, and 
excused itself from acceding to the royal wish. Carry- 
ing its suaviter in modo principle even further, the colony 
not long afterwards presented the King with a shipload 
of masts, which were gratefully accepted. 

So the unequal conflict went on. There is no occa- 
sion to follow in detail the devoted efforts of the 
colony's agents in London, and all the machinations 
of Edward Randolph, "the evil genius of New Eng- 
land," against the " Bostoneers." From the time, in 
1664, when the colony was obliged to repeal the law 
restricting the franchise to members of the Puritan 
churches, it must have been clear that the theocracy 
was doomed. But its death struggle lasted for more 
than twenty years. In October of 1684 the Court of 
Chancery declared the charter of the Massachusetts 
Bay Company vacated. In November of 1685 Samuel 
Sewall recorded in his diary the sober declaration of 
a Boston minister, discussing with his brethren the 
appearance of a dancing master in the town, that 
"'twas not a time for N. E. to dance." In May of 
1686 the Rose frigate, bearing the detested Randolph 
with commissions for the new administrators of a new 
rule, sailed into the harbor, — and the government 
under which Boston as a chartered colony had been 
founded and firmly established was forever at an end. 



Ill 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 



BETWEEN the end of the 
colony and the beginning of 
the royal province Boston passed 
through a brief and exciting pe- 
riod of transition. For the first 
seven months of it, Joseph Dud- 
ley, under royal appointment, 
filled the provisional presidency 
of New England. Both now, and 
in his later governorship, Dudley 
owed much of his unpopularity 
to the fact that as the son of 
Winthrop's contemporary, Gov- 
ernor Thomas Dudley, he was 
regarded as one who should be 
standing with the people against 
the crown instead of taking the 
contrary position. During the six months of his 
presidency it was not his least offence that he aided 
and abetted the Episcopalians in securing the east end 
of the Town House as their first place of worship in 
Boston. But a harder trial than seeing any secular 
building put to this use was yet to come. In all the 
circumstances it is little wonder that the English clergy- 

54 




The Cross captured at 
louisburg. 

In possession of Harvard 
University. 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 55 

man, according to Randolph, was denounced as " Baal's 
priest," and that Boston ministers, inheriting an accu- 
mulated prejudice against the established church, de- 
scribed its prayers as " leeks, garlick, and trash." 

In December of 1686 the arrival of the frigate 7^/«^- 
fisher in Boston harbor marked the end of Dudley's 
presidency, for its all-important passenger was Sir 
Edmund Andros, bearing the royal commission of 
Governor of New England. When James II. was 
the Duke of York, Andros had served him well as 
ruler of his province of New York. In other posts, 
military and civil, Andros had shown himself a faith- 
ful and efficient royalist. His appointment to the 
vacant governorship was therefore most natural. In 
early American history his name has become a byword 
for royal oppression. It may be doubted, however, 
whether anybody sent at this time to do the work 
committed to Andros could have satisfied the people 
of Boston, smarting under the loss of their first 
charter, suspicious of all control from England, and 
as yet without assurance of any permanent form of 
government, good or bad. Yet Andros might at 
least have begun his administration more tactfully. 

Not content with Dudley's appropriation of a por- 
tion of the Town House for services of the established 
church, Andros must needs invade one of the very 
temples of the Puritans. He had not been long in 
Boston when he inspected the three existing meeting- 
houses, and decided that the South would suit his 
purpose best. Utterly against the will of its pro- 



56 BOSTON 

prietors he took possession of it on the Good Friday 
following his arrival, and had the English service con- 
ducted within its walls. This was bad enough, but 
the distress of the people must have reached a pain- 
ful climax on Easter Sunday when the churchmen kept 
the Puritans waiting nearly an hour outside their own 
doors until the established worship of England should 
cease and that of Boston could begin. " 'Twas a sad 
sight," wrote Sewall, " to see how full the street was 
with people, gazing and moving to and fro, because 
[they] had not entrance into the house." 

That nothing might be lacking to offend the people 
he had come to govern, Andros treated them quite as 
cavalierly in temporal matters as in spiritual. The 
landholders of the colony he declared to be mere ten- 
ants at will. As a loyal servant of the crown he main- 
tained that since their lands had been held under a 
royal charter, and since that charter had been with- 
drawn, their titles were at the same time forfeited. 
Thus, not only was their ecclesiastical structure, built 
with pious care, dangerously threatened, but the very 
lands on which they and their houses stood seemed 
slipping from beneath their feet. It could hardly have 
helped matters for the colonists to familiarize them- 
selves with the obverse of the Great Seal of New Eng- 
land used by Andros ; for here were depicted a white 
man and an Indian kneeling with gifts before a king, 
while over their heads a cherub flaunted a Latin 
legend, "A more pleasing liberty has never existed." 

Even if Andros through the two years and more of 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 



57 



his administration had devoted himself otherwise to 
none but conciliatory measures, these two courses 
would have inflamed the people against him. They 
were quite ready and eager, then, to accept as true the 
rumors brought in April ot 1689 by a traveller from 
Nevis that James II had yielded up his throne to 
William of Orange and 






/ 



m. 



\\ ' 



From the Great Seal of New 
England. 



Mary. If the King whom 
Andros had served was 
overthrown, so must An- 
dros be himself. Early in 
the morning of April 18 
the people of the North 
End of the town heard 
that those of the South 
End were up in arms. At 
the South End the same 
report of the North was 
spread. The consequence was that each rallied to 
help the other ; at the same time many troops came 
in from the country. Royalist officials were seized. 
Andros promptly betook himself to the fort on Castle 
Island, now the site of Fort Independence; but when 
it appeared quite useless to resist the people's demand 
for it and him, " it was surrendered up to them with 
cursings." The Governor himself was made a prisoner, 
and a provisional government, based upon the old 
charter, was established. More than a month later the 
authentic news of the accession of William and Mary 
was received. In due time came royal orders to return 



58 BOSTON 

Sir Edmund with some of his friends to England, and 
to continue the provisional government for the present. 
With these mandates there was no unwillingness to com- 
ply, and for a time the people of Boston found them- 
selves practically in possession of all their accustomed 
privileges. So spontaneous, effective, and bloodless a 
revolution has rarely been accomplished. Whatever 
its meaning may have been to those who were con- 
cerned in it, we may fairly regard it to-day as the first 
step toward that vastly greater uprising which has 
made the word Revolution mean but one thing in 
American history. But the whole provincial period 
was yet to intervene. It was not till 1691 that Massa- 
chusetts was definitely established a royal province. 
Before the overthrow of Andros, Increase Mather, 
eluding the vigilance of his enemy Randolph, had 
slipped away to England to plead the restoration of 
the original charter, or failing of that, to secure the 
best form of government that could be got in its place. 
The record of his work in England, where he attained 
to his mother's ambition that he should become " a 
man diligent in business " and so " stand before 
kings," is not to be retold in these pages. What may 
be noticed here is that the man chosen sixty years after 
the founding of the colony to speak for it in England, 
the man who did so in interviews with two kings, and 
in adroit negotiations with politicians and courtiers, was 
the leading minister of Boston, the son of one minis- 
ter, the son-in-law of no less another than the great 
John Cotton, — in a word one who in himself and all 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 59 

his associations represented the old theocratic principle 
of New England. What this Puritan priest and states- 
man brought back with him to Boston in 1692 was as 
good a substitute for the old charter as the unfavoring 
conditions would permit ; and he secured, moreover, a 
governor of his own choosing. He could not prevent 
the change from colony to province, with a governor 
and lieutenant-governor of royal appointment, or the 
governor's privilege of vetoing and rejecting impor- 
tant actions of the legislature to be chosen by the 
people ; but he could and did secure the incorporation 
of Maine, Nova Scotia, and the old Plymouth colony 
into the Province of Massachusetts ; and the first of 
the royal governors. Sir William Phips, a native of 
New England, owed, and was not expected to forget 
that he owed, his office to Increase Mather. 

Not only as the first of the ten acting governors 
under the province charter, but also on account of his 
own picturesque career. Sir William Phips deserves 
something more than cursory notice. His father was 
a gunsmith, near the mouth of the Kennebec, in 
Maine, whose children, of one mother, were said to 
have numbered twenty-six, — a company large enough 
to provide at least one person of distinction. Born 
in 1 65 1, William began his active life as a tender 
of sheep, from which employment he passed to the 
building of coasting vessels and sailing in them. 
Coming thus to Boston he married a widow, and 
varied his occupations still further by going forth to 
fight with Indians. Then there was a voyage to the 



6o BOSTON 

Spanish Main in search of a treasure-ship sunk in 
those fabled waters. The search was unsuccessful, but 
proceeding to London Phips prevailed upon the King, 
James II, and the Admiralty to fit him out a vessel 
well armed and manned to seek again for the treasure. 
For two years he cruised about the West Indies, avail- 
ing of many opportunities to prove his adventurous 
qualities, but gaining nothing beyond what he con- 
sidered positive information concerning the where- 
abouts of the sunken treasure. It was an age of 
adventurers, and though he came back to London 
empty-handed, he did not fail to persuade still other 
gentlemen of England to take shares with him in a 
renewal of his enterprise. This time he met with suc- 
cess, and out of the deep drew up gold and silver 
bullion amounting to a million and a half of dollars, 
besides other treasure in precious jewels. His own 
share of the haul was about a hundred thousand 
dollars, — a noble fortune for the times. His valor, 
or his money, or both, gained him the further prize 
of knighthood. Military and civil honors in New 
England followed quickly. The final honor of the 
governorship, obtained through the mediation of the 
minister whose preaching had first quickened him to a 
sense of sin, provides the fitting climax of a career 
which might adorn a Sunday-school story but for the 
abundance of those ruder elements from which old 
ballads were made. 

In raising such a man to the chief magistracy of the 
province. Increase Mather could not have been quite 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 6i 

without the sense that even " more than most self- 
made men" — as Professor Wendell puts it — "Sir 
William looked up to the clergy, and most of all the 
clergy to the Mathers." He probably did not realize 
that any royal governor, from the very nature of his 
office, was doomed to win something of the very 
unpopularity which Andros achieved. The clerical 
cause, therefore, was inevitably destined to lose more 
than it would gain from close association with the gov- 
ernorship. Unforeseen also were the intensity and 
the results of the witchcraft tragedy, in which Phips 
and Cotton Mather, the greater son of Increase, were 
conspicuous fellow-actors. Not until Lady Phips 
herself fell a victim to the delusion, and was suspected 
of supernatural dealings, did the Governor call a halt 
in the persecutions. In the revulsion of sentiment 
against all the wretched business, the chief persecutors 
were themselves involved. Without this cause for 
unpopularity, Sir William had enough to contend 
with in his inherent unfitness for the governorship, his 
defects of education, his faults of temper, which even 
led him more than once into public personal encounters 
with men from whom he disagreed. Taken together, 
all these things rendered his administration a failure 
so marked that the news of his death in England in 
1695 could have brought little but relief to the people 
against whose charges he was trying to defend himself 
at headquarters. 

Both Increase and Cotton Mather long survived 
him — for the father lived till 1723, the son till 1728. 



62 BOSTON 

Between Phips and the younger Mather the affairs of 
witchcraft provided the chief bond of association. It is 
in connection with these affairs, moreover, that the name 
of Cotton Mather has its greatest significance for the 
generations which have followed. From the days of 
his literal-minded contemporary, Robert Calef, who 
could see nothing but fraud and credulity in the so- 
called diabolic manifestations, down to our own gen- 
eration, Cotton Mather's share in the witchcraft 
delusion has won him a full measure of obloquy. But 
since the appearance of Professor Barrett Wendell's 
study of the man and his times, the candid reader 
must at least accord him the virtue of sincerity. Even 
in such a scene as the hanging, at Salem, of the Rev. 
George Burroughs, a graduate of Harvard, on the 
charge of witchcraft, when Cotton Mather appeared 
amongst the spectators on a horse and assured them 
that the victim's appealing declaration of his innocence 
was a mere inspiration of the devil, he seems to have 
been acting in the confident belief that he was going 
about his Master's business. If to-day his records of 
spiritual phenomena were first appearing as reports 
of psychical research, they would not stand forth 
as unprecedented statements, but in many instances 
would mark the recorder as a careful investigator and 
historian of occult science. 

Putting the matter of witchcraft, however, wholly to 
one side, Cotton Mather remains in important aspects 
the chief figure of his time in Boston. If scholarship 
is to be judged by its fruits — and Mather's death-bed 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 



63 



advice to his son was to bear constantly in mind the 
word Fructuosus — there are no less than 382 titles 
of publications from his pen to speak for the indus- 
try of his mind 
and hand. Dun- 
ton, the London 
bookseller, might 
have said perhaps 
more truly of him 
than of his contem- 
porary, the Rev. 
Samuel Willard, 
" I darken his mer- 
its if I call him less 
than a walking li- 
brary." For his 
preaching — it 
must have been 
partly his power 
and not wholly his 
theme, which made 
it necessary for him, on the occasion of delivering a 
discourse upon some condemned murderers, to reach 
his pulpit by climbing over the shoulders of his con- 
gregation. It is a curious fact that in matters of civil 
government, to which of course his influence extended, 
we are said to owe the Mathers our American plan 
which compels the legislative representative of any 
district to be an inhabitant of the district which he 
represents — a measure first introduced for the politi- 




CoTTON Mather. 



64 BOSTON 

cal advantage of the theocratic party, which had its 
chief strength in the country regions. This was a 
more doubtful service to his country than his effort 
later in life to check the frightful ravages of the 
epidemics of smallpox in Boston. In 1721 came one 
of the worst of them. The population of the town 
was estimated at less than eleven thousand. Of these 
it is said that nearly six thousand had the disease, and 
nearly one thousand died. It was high time for 
vigorous action of some sort. Cotton Mather had 
read of what inoculation might do, but his proposal to 
introduce it in Boston " raised an horrid Clamour." 
In his son Samuel, afterwards a distinguished minister, 
he found a brave abettor of his plan ; the boy offered 
himself for experiment. With deep searchings of 
heart the father, like another Abraham, put his beliefs 
to the test. The boy fell rapidly sick and came so 
near to death as to fill his father's soul with fear and 
the town with uproar. But one day his Bible, opened 
at random, bore him the welcome message, " Go thy 
way, thy son liveth." And the promise was fulfilled. 
This was in August. In November his "kinsman, 
the minister of Roxbury," came to his house for 
inoculation. One night during the patient's illness 
some unknown ruffian threw into the window of the 
room where he lay a heavy iron " grenado" charged 
with powder and oil of turpentine. By some good 
chance it did not explode ; and on it was found a 
paper bearing the words, " Cotton Mather, you Dog ; 
Dam you ; I'l inoculate you with this, with a pox to 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 6s 

you." The incident is noteworthy to-day chiefly for 
its showing of the bitterness with which a daring 
movement forward was resisted. The triumph of 
the pioneer in the face of such opposition is no less 
extraordinary. Surely Cotton Mather the minister, 
the scholar, the man of affairs, the servant of humanity, 
is to be remembered as something more than a harrier 
of witches. 

Upon nearly the whole period through which the 
Mathers, father and son, occupied the centre of the 
Boston stage, the clearest contemporary light is cast by 
the diary kept by Samuel Sewall through most of his 
long life ending in 1730. Over and above all it tells 
of other men and of passing events, its interest lies 
largely in the faithful, unconscious picture it draws 
of the writer himself. Sewall has been called, so 
often as to make one almost tired of the name, " the 
Puritan Pepys"; yet the English and the Boston 
Samuel have one thing so much in common that the 
definition justifies itself. Each is at his best in self- 
revelation. Samuel Sewall shows himself not only a 
typical Boston citizen of his time, but also a man of 
quaint and striking individuality. His education re- 
ceived at Harvard College, and his wealth, acquired in 
part by marriage with the daughter of the rich mint- 
master John Hull, gave him place amongst the leaders 
of the laity. As an ofiicer of town and state he served 
the people in many capacities, from night-watchman to 
chief justice of Massachusetts. His open repentance 
for the part he had played in the witchcraft trials, and 



66 



BOSTON 



his publication of the pamphlet, " The Selling of 
Joseph," the earliest of Boston antislavery documents, 
spoke for his independence of mind. In affairs of the 
church he stood for the old against the new order, 
even to the extent of deserting tor a time his own 




Vita fine Uteris eft Mortis Imago ; At 
Vita fine Chrifto eft Morte pejor. 

Si CHRISTUM Jifeii, nihil eft pc<etera mfe'u. 
Si CHRlSJVMmfcit^ nihil tfi fi eatefa difdt, 

SAMUELIS SEWALL 

Iiber« i 

Anno Domini. 



«^ c^ 



Samuel Sewai.i.'s B(jok-pi.ate. 
In possession of the Author. 

minister for the unpardonable sin of cutting his hair 
and wearing a wig. When the aged schoolmaster, 
Ezekiel Cheever, died and Sewall came to sum up his 
virtues, the climax of praise was reached in — " He 
abominated Periwigs." His piety found private ex- 
pression in days of fasting, prayer, and self-examination. 
The diary gives a detailed account of one of these 
vigils — of which in the end he recorded, " I had a very 




PROVINCIAL BOSTON 67 

comfortable day of it." The funerals he attended, the 
scarfs, rings, and gloves presented to him, according to 
the custom of the day, as a mourner, occupy a pro- 
digious space in his chronicles. The mortuary habit 
of the time provided him even with " an awfull yet 
pleasing treat " in visiting his own family tomb and in- 
specting the coffins of his elders and children. In the 
church we see him leading the singing for many years 
until one day a front tooth in his under jaw came out, 
and he put " this old servant and daughter of Musick " 
into his pocket with pious reflections that his own 
career was nearly ended. As the venerable suitor for 
a second wife, he records one episode of courtship, 
often quoted, yet well deserving repetition for its ready 
gallantry : " Ask'd her to acquit me of Rudeness if I 
drew off her Glove. Enquiring the reason, I told her 
'twas great odds between handling a dead Goat and a 
living Lady." Pepys himself could have made no better 
retort. Altogether the picture of Sewall, as drawn by 
his own pen, is one of the indispensable figures in any 
general view of Boston. 

It is remarkable, indeed, how much more conspicu- 
ous in the retrospect is this man who drew his own 
picture than most of the royal governors, — those 
truly glittering figures of their successive days. In 
the matter of portraiture, one must remember, it was 
their misfortune to be largely at the mercy of others, 
who could not in the nature of things be wholly 
friendly. The unhappy Hutchinson, the last of the 
governors under the civil law, had bitter occasion to 



68 BOSTON 

write in his diary : " Gubernatorum vituperatio populo 
placet^ and every governor of Massachusetts Bay, tor 
near a century past, has by experience found the truth 
of it." Yet the governors succeeding Sir WilHam 
Phips — ten, if we include General Gage the military 
ruler at the end of the period, and exclude the lieuten- 
ant-governors who held the post ad interim — were 
frequently men of good intentions and considerable 
abilities. They brought with them to the democratic 
town and its Province House, which in 171 6 became 
their home, an atmosphere of courts and society by no 
means unwelcome to the ever-present Tory element. 
But with the other and dominant element there was 
one constant, rather sordid struggle which must have 
given their assumption of vice-regal state an ironical 
aspect. The crown did not reward their labors with a 
definite salary ; the self-sufficing people would have ob- 
jected to having their magistrates paid from abroad. The 
payment of the governors was left to the legislature, 
and that body consistently refused to vote salaries to 
officials not of their own choice. Year by year they 
voted a grant larger or smaller according to the ac- 
ceptability of the governor in office. Here was an 
obvious source of disagreement between governor and 
governed. Incessant disputing over an income never 
yet promoted good feeling, and of this standing quar- 
rel the annals of the period are full. 

It is impossible to attempt more than a pass- 
ing glance at some of the governors and the distin- 
guishing events and persons of their successive terms. 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 6() 

The second governor, Richard Coote, Earl of Bello- 
mont, whose rule of less than two years ended in 1701, 
can hardly be noticed without a mention of the Captain 
Kidd whose memory has never been so successfully 
buried as his treasure. It was under Bellomont that 
this notorious character, possessing now that strange 
if dim reality of a mythical personage, sailed and sailed, 
and underwent trial in Boston for converting a King's 
errand to the Spanish Main into a cruise of private 
piracy. Bellomont was followed by Joseph Dudley, 
the end of whose administration brings us as far into 
the century as 171 5. As provisional governor under 
the first charter and as an associate of Andros, he had 
won a fair measure of the unpopularity which the 
native New Englander who became too good a loyalist 
was sure to attain. As governor of the royal province, 
he could hardly fail to increase this unpopularity, or 
to bring the day of utter estrangement between old 
and new England definitely nearer. It was this unin- 
tentional service to their countrymen which gained for 
Dudley and Hutchinson the distinction of being the 
best hated of their line. 

What the governors were doing through the some- 
what monotonous years of their period may well con- 
cern us less than the interests of the people. The 
terms of Samuel Shute, William Burnet, and Jonathan 
Belcher, covering the years from 17 16 to 1741, differ 
in no important points of administration or popular 
feeling. Under Shute there was fighting with Indians, 
under all three fighting about salaries, and at the end 



70 BOSTON 

of Belcher's term came the first visit and preaching of 
George Whitefield. At this point, then, we may stop a 
moment to look at the absorbing interest of the pro- 
vincial church. All the world knows the words of 
Burke at the tiine when conciliation with America 
had to be discussed in England : " The religion most 
prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on 
the principles of resistance ; it is the dissidence of dis- 
sent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion." 
And indeed just as the form of civil government 
was breeding estrangement throughout the provincial 
period, so this dissenting dissent was constantly nour- 
ishing in Boston a p>opular sentiment of independence. 
The multiplication of churches in Boston tells part of 
the story. Before 1699, the First, Second, and South 
churches sufficed for the Puritan congregations. The 
foundation before the middle of the eighteenth century 
of the Brattle Street, or Manifesto, the New North, 
the New South, the New Brick, the Hollis Street, to 
say nothing of what the Episcopalians, Quakers, 
Baptists, French Protestants, and Irish Presbyterians 
were doing, bespeaks a development out of proportion 
with the growth of the town. It was the fashion of 
the time not merely to differ in opinion but to express 
difference in action. The Manifesto Church O6991 
took its name from the Manifesto in which it set forth 
its tendency toward more liberal beliefs and methods. 
Yet for all its emancipation the church could not bring 
itself to use the " pair of organs " bequeathed to it by 
Thomas Brattle in 17 13, and voted, "that they did 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 71 

not think it proper to use the same in the public wor- 
ship of God." Troubled by no such scruples. King's 
Chapel profited bv this Puritan rigor, and came into 
possession of the lirst organ used in New England. 
When there was a disa*jreement about the insrallation 
of the Rev. Peter Thacher over the New North in 
1-20, a schism in the society resulted in the foundation 



A 

■■i-i 




Kt*£-^ ■ 



The Olp Brick Cwmcii. xkxriy OFi\-<c?irE Old S^ATE-HOfSK. 

of the New Brick. According to an historian of the 
New North, quoted by L. M. S;u^nt in his diverting 
Dira/iHgs with the Deoti^ the malcontents " first thought 
of denominating it [their church] the Revenge Church 
ot Christ ; but thev thought better of it, and c-alled it 
the New Brick Church. However, the first name w;is 
retained tor many years among the common people. 
Their zeal was great, indeed, and descended to pueril- 
ity. They placed the fiijure of a cock as a vane upon 
the steeple, out of derision of Mr. Thachor. wliose 



72 



BOSTON 




The Cockerel Church 
Vane. 



Christian name was Peter. Taking advantage of a 
wind, which turned the head of the cock toward the 
New North meeting-house, when it was placed upon 
the spindle, a merry fellow straddled over it, and 

crowed three times, to com- 
plete the ceremony." From 
this weather-vane, now sur- 
mounting the spire of the 
Shepard Memorial Church in 
Cambridge, the New Brick ac- 
quired the alternative name of 
the Cockerel Church. 

The serious records of the 
Puritan church are interspersed 
with many bits of humor, con- 
scious and unconscious. The clerical habit, for exam- 
ple, of choosing texts with a personal bearing may or 
may not have been practised with a humorous intention. 
It is told of the Rev. Mather Byles, the Tory minister 
of the Hollis Street Church, that disappointed one day 
in the expectation that the Rev. Mr. Prince would 
preach for him, he rose and preached himself from the 
text, " Put not your trust in princes." Here we may 
draw our own conclusions, for Mr. Byles was the 
notorious Boston wit of his time. It helps us to place 
him as a citizen of the world by remembering that he 
was a correspondent of Dr. Watts, and of Pope, who 
sent him a presentation quarto copy of the Odyssey. 
He it was whom a parishioner once found nailing list 
on his doors to keep out the cold. " The wind 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 



73 



bloweth wheresoever it listeth, Dr. Byles," said the 
parishioner. " Yes, sir," repHed the Doctor, " and 
man Hsteth wheresoever it bloweth." The puns and 
quips of the witty minister well repay the search that 
may readily be made for them. 

Certainly there was an element of unconscious 
humor in a fact noted by a traveller, Edward Ward, 
who, near the beginning of the pro- 
vincial period, told many questionable 
tales about the Bostonians : "They 
keep no Saints Days, nor will they 
allow the Apostles to be Saints ; yet 
they assume that Sacred Dignity to 
themselves, and say, in the Title Page 
of their Psalm-Book, 'Printed for the 
Edification of the Saints in Old and 
New England.'" In so far as this is 
a matter of printed record, it may be 
taken more seriously than other ob- 
servations of this traveller. Many 
of his statements are palpably false ; 
and we may hope the following story 
is one of the fabrications : " I was 
mightily pleas'd one Morning with a 
contention between two Boys at a 
Pump in Boston, about who should 
draw their Water first. One Jostled 
the other from the Handle, and he 
would fill his Bucket first, because his Master said 
Prayers and Sung Psalms twice a Day in his family. 




Mather Byles's 

Clock. 

In possession of the 

Bostonian Society. 



74 BOSTON 

and the other Master did not. To which the Witty 
Knave made this reply, Our House stands backward 
in a Court ; if my Master had a Room next the Street, 
as your Master has, he'd pray twice to your Master's 
once, that he wou'd, and therefore I'll fill my pail 
first, marry will I, and did accordingly." 

The state of affairs suggested by this anecdote, 
probably a piece of fiction, was more accurately 
recorded by the Rev. George Whitefield when he first 
visited Boston in 1740. He found the town "remark- 
able for the external observance of the Sabbath. Men 
in civil offices have a regard for religion. The Gover- 
nor [Belcher] encourages them ; and the ministers and 
magistrates seem to be more united than those in any 
other place where I have been. I never saw so little 
scoffing : never had so little opposition." These words 
were written immediately after Whitefield had brought 
to Boston his contribution to "The Great Awakening." 
The fame of the young Church of England preacher 
had travelled from Georgia to New England, and the 
Puritan ministers of Boston had sent for him to rouse 
the people from what was considered their lethargy. 
In a community which responded as Boston did to the 
ministrations of Whitefield, there could have been no 
dearth of religious susceptibility. The crowd that 
thronged once to hear him in the Old South packed 
the streets so densely that he had to enter the still 
familiar building through one of its windows. At the 
New South one Monday afternoon a panic resulted 
from a noise in the gallery, and " several were trod to 



if i- 



^ 1 k 



- /" 



'^. 



m. 



f/' 



-'iff ^;/||/-' >/-.,_ :^/ 




The Old South Church, with its New Surroundings; 
CORNER OF Washington and Milk streets. 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 77 

death." Whitefield led the crowd to the Common, 
and there preached his sermon. The present-day 
Sunday afternoon gatherings on the Charles Street 
Mall are meagre groups compared with the multitudes 
which this young evangelist, not yet twenty-six years 
old, gathered about him on the autumnal week days 
and Sundays of 1740. Once the congregation was 
reckoned as numbering eight or ten thousand persons, 
and when he bade farewell to Boston at the end of 
this first visit, it is said that twenty thousand or more 
came to the Common to hear him. To this number 
the neighboring towns must have contributed liberally, 
for Boston itself at this time was supposed to have 
only eighteen thousand inhabitants. Controversy" 
regarding the value of Whitefield's services followed 
his departure ; but one minister bore record that never 
before, " except at the time of the general earthquake," 
had the people been " so happily concerned about 
their souls," and another testified even that " negroes 
and boys left their rudeness." Perhaps the strongest of 
all witnesses to the effectiveness of Whitefield's preach- 
ing is Benjamin Franklin, the Boston boy. It was 
when he was grown a man in Philadelphia that he had 
the experience described with characteristic frankness 
in his Autobiography^ whence it is often quoted. Listen- 
ing to one of Whitefield's sermons, says Franklin, " I 
perceived that he intended to finish with a collection, 
and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. 
I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three 
or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he 



78 



BOSTON 



proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give 
the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me 
ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; 
and he finish'd so admirably, that 1 empty'd my 
pocket wholly into the collection dish, gold and all." 

But this story be- 
longs primarily to 
Philadelphia. In 
Boston there is the 
testimony of a lady 
who heard one of 
Whitefield's ser- 
mons on the Com- 
mon. The sun had 
just risen. The 
words of the preach- 
er's text were "If 
I take the wings 
of the morning and 
dwell in the utter- 
most parts of the 
sea," and his voice, 
GEORGE wiuTKiiELi). said the hearer, 

"was like that of an angel when he uttered them, 
while his arms rose slowly from his sides with an inde- 
scribable grace. I should have felt no surprise to 
see him ascend into the air. That would have been 
no miracle. The miracle was rather that he remained 
on earth." To the readers of Boston history, the 
significance of the entire Whitefield episode lies not 




PROVINCIAL BOSTON 79 

only in the marvellous power of the preacher, but also 
in that general concern about the soul which made the 
people — apparently more than all contained in Boston 
itself — eager to go forth and hear him. 

During the long term of Governor William Shirley, 
extending from 1741 to 1756, Whitefield paid the 
second and third of his five visits to Boston. Through 
the years covered by this governorship the provincial 
town may be seen in many of its most characteristic 
aspects. The industries of ship-building and com- 
merce, though steadily losing their importance as the 
Revolution drew nearer, throve to an extent which 
made Boston the chief port of North America. 
Energy and thrift, on sea and land, brought fortune 
to the merchants and busy occupation to all. The 
houses, gardens, dress, and modes of living bespoke 
widespread comfort and even a degree of luxury which 
did not mark the families enjoying it as rare excep- 
tions to the general rule. An Englishman named 
Bennett, who visited the town in 1740, has left abun- 
dant record of the pleasant impression made by many 
things he saw. With his aid, and that of others, one 
may reconstruct a surprisingly attractive social life, 
with its afternoon promenades in the Mall on the 
northwest side of the Common, and its glimpses of 
gentlewomen who " visit, drink tea and indulge every 
piece of gentility to the height of the mode, and 
neglect the affairs of their families with as good a 
grace as the finest ladies in London." Yet the train- 
ing of New England housewives was by no means so 



8o 



BOSTON 



utterly ignored as the Londoner's report might lead 
one to think. The fourth anniversary of a society for 
Promoting Industry and Frugality was memorably 
celebrated in 1749. "Three hundred young female 
spinsters, decently dressed," brought their spinning- 
wheels to the Common one afternoon, and plied their 

homely craft, " a female " at each 
wheel, to the accompaniment of 
music and the delight of many 
spectators. 

All this seems strangely re- 
mote from our own day. Yet 
the year in which it took place 
i| is linked to the present by the 
¥3.^aptr*h' very existence of one of the most 
familiar landmarks of Boston. 
In 1749 Governor Shirley laid 
the corner-stone of the present 
King's Chapel, erected outside the walls of the Episco- 
pal church building which had its beginning in the time 
of Andros. The architect of the new structure, Peter 
Harrison, whose work lives also in Trinity Church, 
Newport, and Christ Church, Cambridge, planned a 
spire which has not yet grown out of the sturdy 
tower. The one important change in the original ap- 
pearance of the building came with the addition of 
the portico in 1789. Within, as we shall see, the faith 
of the worshippers has changed. It is to the Epis- 
copal parish of Christ Church, whose building, still in 
use on Salem street, was erected in 1723, that we must 




The original Faneuil 
Hall. 




^"II?^=^J!^^^^S^^^I? ~5^^^^~ 



The Faneuil Hall of To-day. 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 83 

look for the longest continuity in Boston of forms and 
place of worship. 

To the decade in which the present King's Chapel 
was begun belongs the origin of another building 
intimately associated with the history of the town. 
Aside from all its practical use, Faneuil Hall has 
been of constant service in perpetuating one of the 
French Huguenot names of eighteenth-century Bos- 
ton, — names amongst which Brimmer, Revere, Char- 
don, Sigourney, and Bowdoin are also to be counted. 
When Peter Faneuil, a prosperous and public-spirited 
merchant, offered to erect a market-house, a strong 
local prejudice against buildings of the sort caused 
the grudging acceptance of the gift implied in a vote 
of 367 to 360. On the completion of the building 
one of its first uses was for a town-meeting, in March, 
1742-3, immediately after the death of the donor. 
Then John Lovell, master of the Latin School, pro- 
nounced a eulogy on Peter Faneuil, and declared the 
building to be " incomparably the greatest benefaction 
ever yet known to our Western shore." As we know 
it now, the hall has undergone the changes occasioned 
by a fire which destroyed all but the walls in 1761, 
and by enlargements through lengthening and adding 
a third story in 1805. But still the grasshopper — 
perhaps a nimble emblem of trade, since Peter Faneuil 
is said to have borrowed it from the Royal Exchange 
in London — serves for its weather-vane; and still the 
American schoolboy knows the building not as a 
market but as the " Cradle of Liberty." To this 



84 BOSTON 

term he will probably cling in spite of the objection 
raised in the same Dealings with the Dead to which 
reference has already been made : " The proverbial 
use of the cradle has ever been to rock the baby to 
sleep; and Heaven knows our old fathers made no 
such use of Faneuil Hall, in their early management 
of the bantling; for it was an ever-wakeful child, 
from the very moment of its first, sharp, shrill, life- 
cry. 

No benefaction of peace, however, could have done 
so much to make Shirley's time remembered as the 
conspicuous act of military prowess which connects 
his name with the fall of Louisburg, the French 
" Gibraltar " of Cape Breton. To Shirley belongs 
much of the credit for sending out the provincial 
troops which under Pepperell in 1745, with the aid 
of an English fleet, laid a six-weeks' siege to the 
distant and apparently impregnable fortress. The 
enterprise has not unreasonably been called "a Bos- 
ton undertaking." It has also been defined as "an 
extraordinary piece of good luck, and nothing else." 
The surrender of 650 soldiers and 1300 civilians 
was its glorious result, of which many generations of 
Harvard students have had a tangible reminder in the 
iron cross brought from the garrison chapel at Louis- 
burg, and only in recent years moved from its place 
above the entrance to the college library at Cambridge 
to a safer lodgment within the walls. Protestant zeal 
and Anglo-Saxon pride gloried alike in the victory. 
Incidentally the provincial soldier learned that he 



PROVINCIAL BOSTON 



85 



could make an effective fight against foes more 
"civilized" than the Indians. 

The term of Shirley extended eleven years beyond 
the fall of Louisburg, until 1756. We have looked 




Present Entrance to Governor Shirley's Mansion, 
Shirley Street, Dorchester. 

rather upon the achievements of the time than at its 
inevitable troubles. The people and the governor 
were of course frequently at odds, but misunderstand- 
ings of so much more serious a nature were soon to 
come that we can afford to emphasize the brighter 



86 BOSTON 

colors of this mid-century picture. Shirley's suc- 
cessor in office, Governor Thomas Pownall, whose 
rule began in 1757 and ended at his own request 
in 1760, made perhaps a more definite effort toward 
sympathy with those he came to govern. His was 
the foresight, unusual in a royal governor, to prophesy 
that the American people would eventually " grow res- 
tive, and disposed to throw off their dependency upon 
their mother country;" and his vision of the future 
America was that of " an asylum one day or another 
to a remnant of mankind who wish and deserve to 
live with political liberty." How near that day was 
to his own he did not suspect. Immediately after 
him began the train of circumstances which could 
culminate only in revolution. Provincial Boston was 
technically to endure fifteen years longer; yet the 
changes in its thought and actions came so quickly 
after Pownall's withdrawal that a new chapter, under 
a new title, is needed for their narration. 



IV 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 




CERTAIN places and men in all the 
history of the world have suddenly 
emerged from local into national or uni- 
versal significance. Through the preced- 
ing years the town records have been the 
records of town taxes and town disputes ; 
the citizens have appeared as candidates and voters at 
this and that election. Indeed they are little or noth- 
ing more — until, all at once, they find themselves a 
part of national history. It may not be for long, yet it 
is long enough to set them definitely 
apart from the men and the places 
which have remained merely local. 

For Boston the Revolutionary 
period — including the fifteen years 
leading up to the final catastrophe — 
was preeminently the time of this 
distinction. The result is that Bos- 
ton local history, through the sixth 
and seventh decades of the eighteenth century, furnishes 
much of the most familiar material of American history. 
To regard it here wholly as local or wholly as national 
history would be to do what has already been done 
excellently and often. Let us rather, for a while, look 

87 




NVoSHILMNCiS/ 



Stamp Act Stamp. 



88 BOSTON 

at some of the successive events as scenes in the lives 
of representative Boston men of their day. Perhaps a 
few of the events themselves will show even the more 
clearly for serving as the background of personal 
activities. 

In one of the first of these events the principal 
actor was James Otis, the place of whose burial is 
familiar to those of the hurrying thousands who look 
aside from modern Tremont Street into the Old 
Granary Burying-ground. In 1761 James Otis was 
no less a person than advocate-general of the province, 
then governed by Sir Francis Bernard, who had suc- 
ceeded Pownall the year before, and deserves special 
remembrance in later generations as the architect of 
Harvard Hall at Cambridge, and for his reputed ability 
to recite the whole of Shakespeare's works from mem- 
ory. As advocate-general it was the duty of Otis to 
defend in a test case a government measure issuing 
" Writs of Assistance " which enabled the customs 
officers to search the houses of persons suspected of 
smuggling. Instead of defending this law Otis resigned 
his post, and became the spokesman of those who 
undertook to prove the government's position illegal. 
The case was tried in February, 1761, before Thomas 
Hutchinson, recently created chief justice, and his four 
associate judges. When the King's attorney had said 
his say, and Oxenbridge Thacher, a Boston lawyer of 
high repute, had made his scholarly reply, James Otis 
flashed upon the scene. " Otis," said the diary of 
John Adams in describing the occasion, "was a flame 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 89 

of fire. With a promptitude of classical allusions, a 
depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events 
and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic 
glance of his eye into futurity, and a torrent of impet- 
uous eloquence, he hurried away everything before 
him." Taking the good old English position that a 
man's house is his castle, he made his plea for tne true 
British liberties against which no act of Parliament 
could prevail. " I oppose that kind of power," he 
declared, " the exercise of which, in former periods of 
English history, cost one king of England his head 
and another his throne." Here were words of a sort 
to which the ears of Boston men had not yet grown 
accustomed. But the future was in them. John 
Adams might well write : " Every man of a crowded 
audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready 
to take arms against the writs of assistance. Then and 
there was the first scene of the first act of opposition 
to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and 
there the child Independence was born." It made no 
great matter that Hutchinson, reserving his decision 
till he could receive instructions from England, 
adjudged the Writs of Assistance entirely legal. The 
speech of Otis announced the beginning of a new 
order, and Otis himself stepped into the full light of 
popular favor. 

Yet Otis was by no means of constant service to the 
American cause. His morbid and uncertain temper 
rendered him often a difficult inmate even of the house 
of his friends. From these in turn there are intima- 



90 BOSTON 

tions that self-seeking, and the pique resulting from the 
appointment of Hutchinson instead of the father of 
Otis to the chief-justiceship, went far to determine his 
course of action. Other motives were even more 
obscure. More than once he is to be seen on the 
government side of points at issue. In spite of all this 
it was his, in town-meetings and legislature, to hold 
and sway the people as only an orator can. From him, 
at the very first, they took their rallying cry, " no taxa- 
tion without representation." To give a country its 
watchwords is like writing its ballads. When, there- 
fore, the attack made upon Otis in 1769 by Captain 
Robinson, a Commissioner of Customs, resulted in the 
wrecking of a mind already of uneven balance, the 
people who had made his words their own were deeply 
stirred with sorrow and indignation. There were still 
to be times when Otis, even in public places, was him- 
self again. One likes to think he was most himself 
when he refused, after Captain Robinson's acknowledg- 
ment of fault and contrition, to accept the payment 
of damages, ^2000 sterling, awarded him by a jury. 
And surely there was a return of his true spirit, when, 
armed with a borrowed musket, he appeared amongst 
the American troops on the scene of the Bunker Hill 
fight, and, protected by the providence which cares 
for children, did a man's share of the long day's 
work. 

Against the unhappy variations in the course of 
Otis, one naturally places the consistent steadiness of 
Samuel Adams as the central figure of Revolutionary 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 91 

Boston. " As Massachusetts led the thirteen colo- 
nies," Dr. James K. Hosmer has written in his biog- 
raphy of Samuel Adams, " the town of Boston led 
Massachusetts." Of the man who led Boston, the 
biographer further says : " Of this town of towns 
Samuel Adams was the son of sons. He was strangely 
identified with it always. He was trained in Boston 
schools and Harvard College. He never left the town 
except on the town's errands, or those of the Province 
of which it was the head. He had no private business 
after the first year of his manhood ; he was the public 
servant simply and solely in places large and small, — 
fire-ward, committee to see that chimneys were safe, 
tea collector, moderator of town-meeting, representa- 
tive. One may almost call him the creature of the 
town-meeting." Through these words we see him 
clearly as the democrat, — the man who looked to the 
people as the true source of authority and power. As 
early as 1743 when he took his Master's degree at the 
Harvard Commencement, the subject of his thesis was : 
"Whether it be Lawful to resist the Supreme Magis- 
trate, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise pre- 
served." What his argument was we do not know ; 
but it is easy enough to imagine the conclusion at 
which he arrived. Of all the leaders of the opposi- 
tion to royal encroachment on provincial rights, it was 
he who first foresaw, certainly as early as 1768, the 
inevitable separation. Through all the stirring scenes 
in which, with this end constantly in view, he bore a 
conspicuous part — in town-meeting and legislature, in 



92 



BOSTON 



the formation and guidance 
of the all-important Commit- 
tee of Correspondence — we 
cannot undertake to follow 
him. The story of one day 
— the day following the " Bos- 
ton Massacre " — is amply 
illustrative of the quality and 
effectiveness of his leader- 
ship. 

Two regiments of British 
troops, the 14th and the 29th, 
had been quartered in the 
town for a year and a half 
when, on the night of March 
5, 1770, the friction between 
the soldiers and the people, 
represented that night by 
some boys and older mischief- 
makers, culminated in a volley 
of bullets from the soldiery. 
Three of the townspeople were 
killed, eight were wounded. 
" Such," says John Fiske, at 
the conclusion of his detailed 
description of the event, " was the famous Boston Mas- 
sacre. All the mildness of New England civilization 
is brought most strikingly before us in that trucu- 
lent phrase. The careless shooting of half a dozen 
townsmen is described by a word which historians 




'^mmm^rn^ 



Samuel Adams. 

Statue in Adams Square, by 

Anne WHiitnev. 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 



93 



apply to such events as Cawnpore and the SiciHan 
Vespers." 

On the next morning the selectmen waited on Lieu- 
tenant-governor Hutchinson, acting governor since 
Bernard's departure in the preceding July, and declared 
that the troops and the people could no longer live in 
the same town. Hutchinson put them off by saying 
he had no authority to order the removal of the mili- 
tary. Meanwhile the people had gathered in Faneuil 
Hall, whither the selectmen were summoned. There 
a committee of fifteen was appointed to repeat the 
demand for removal, and a general town-meeting was 
called for three o'clock in the afternoon. But with 
Hutchinson the fifteen were no more successful than 
the selectmen had been. He stood manfully to his 
guns, declaring that the power to remove the troops 
lav solely in General Gage, then in New York. Un- 
fortunately for Hutchinson, Colonel Dalrymple, the 
senior military officer in Boston at the time, said that 
one of the regiments could be removed if the magis- 
trates strongly desired it. This was the message the 
committee was finally empowered to convey to the 
anxious town-meeting. So great a throng had come 
to it that Faneuil Hall, smaller than it is to-day, was 
inadequate, and an adjournment to the Old South 
Meeting-house had taken place. 

It was a short walk, then, that the committee had to 
take — from the head of King (now State) Street to 
the head of Milk Street. But it was a walk which 
Samuel Adams turned to momentous account. Hat 



94 BOSTON 

in hand he passed, with his fellows, between the double 
row of townspeople overflowing from the meeting- 
house into the streets. Right and left as he walked, 
he turned to the eager citizens, and said, and said 
again, " Both regiments or none ! " For the purpose 
of the day it was as good a phrase as any that Otis 
ever coined for the currency of speech. Once within 
the Old South, the committee delivered its message : 
one regiment might go to the Castle in the harbor 
if the magistrates must have it so. But from all 
the people, crowding the floor, stairways, doors and 
galleries, rolled back the words of Adams, " Both 
regiments or none ! " This was the simple reply 
which the committee of seven, now chosen, had 
to bear back to the Lieutenant-governor, his august 
councillors, and the military authorities. It was only 
fitting that Sam Adams, having framed in the street 
the answer which the town-meeting gave in the 
meeting-house, should deliver it in the council cham- 
ber. And so he did — in the plainest terms. "If 
you, or Colonel Dalrymple under you," — he ad- 
dressed himself to Hutchinson, — "have the power to 
remove one regiment, you have the power to remove 
both ; and nothing short of their total removal will 
satisfy the people or preserve the peace of the Prov- 
ince." With such argument as this, he convinced all 
but Hutchinson. At last the sturdy loyalist himself, 
persuaded by his secretary, Andrew Oliver, that 
further resistance was futile, yielded the point, and both 
regiments were ordered to the Castle. Thus it was 





KING, 

A PROCLAMATION, 

For fupprefllng Rebellion and Sedition. 
GEORGE ft. 

^^'HEREAS many of Our Subjefls In divers Parts of Our Colonics and Plantations 

'^s>?SBS-*'^i'" .'^^?^ '" North America, milled by dangerous and ill-defigning Men, and forgetting 



the Allegiance which they owe to the Power that has protefted and lullained 
them, alter various diforderly Afls commuted in Difturbance of the Publick 
Peace, to the Obflruflion ct lawful Commerce, and to the Oppreffion of Our 
loyal Subjefls carrying on the fame, have at length proceeded to an open and 
avowed Rebellion, by arraying themfelvcs in hollile Manner to withftand the 
Execution of the Lasv, and traitoroufly preparing, ordering, and levying War 
againft Us; And whereas there Is Reafon.to apprehend that luch Rebellion hath 
been much promoted and encouraged by the traitorous Corriifpondence, Counlels, and Comfort of 
divers wicked and defperatePerfons within this Realm: To the End therefore that none of Our Subjefls 
may neglefl or violate their Duty through Ignorance thercot, or through any' Doubt of the Protetlion 
which the Law will afford to their Loyalty and Zeal ; We have thought fit, by and with the Advice of 
Our Privy Council, to ilTue this Our Royal Proclamation, hereby declaring that not onlv all Our 
Officers Civil and Military arc obliged to exert their utmoft Endeavours to fupprcfs fuch Rebellion, and 
to bring the Traitors to Juftice ; but that all Our Subjefls of this Realm and the Dominions thereunto 
belonging are bound by Law to be aiding and affifling.irf the SupprclTion of fuch Rebellion, and to 
difclofe and make known all traitorous Confpiracics and Attempts againfl Us, Our Crown and Dignity; 
And We do accordingly fttjflly charge and command all Our Officers as well Civil as Military, 
and all other Our obedient and loyal Subjefls, to ufe their utmoft Endeavours to withftand and 
fupprels fucK Rebellion, and to difclofe and make known all Trealbns and traitorous Confpi- 
racics which they fhall know to be againft Us, Our Crown and Dignity ; and for that Purpofe, 
that they tr'anfmit to One of Our Principal Secretaries of State, or other proper Officer, due anti 
full Information of all Perfons who fhall be found carrying on Correfpondence wuh, or m any 
Manner or Degree aiding or abetting the Perfons now in open Arms and Rebellion againft Our 
Government wiihin any of Our Colonics and Plantations in North ylmcr:ca, in order to bring to 
condign Puniftiment the Authors, Perpetrators, and Abettors of fuch traitorous Defigns. 

Given at Our Court at St. ynmes'i, the Twenty-third Day of AuguJI, One thoufand 
feven hundred and feventy-five, in the Fifteenth Year of Our Reign. 



God fave the King. 



Printed by ChorUi Ejrc and lyilliam Stmha 



N D O N: 

. Printers to ihe King's moft Excellent Majelly. 



Broadside in possession of Boston Public Library, 



96 BOSTON 

that the 14th and 29th regiments of his Majesty's 
forces won from the lips of Lord North himself the 
memorable nickname of the " Sam Adams Regiments." 
By this title they are still known in local history. In 
the annals of the British Army the 14th, with a record 
extending from the siege of Gibraltar and Culloden, 
through Corunna, Waterloo, and the Crimea down to 
South Africa, is now the " Prince of Wales's Own " ; 
the 29th, which fought at Ramillies, in the Peninsular 
campaign, and against the Boers, has become the 
" Worcestershire." The name of Sam Adams does 
not happen to appear in the army list in connection 
with either regiment. 

The energy and power of one man in turning the 
tragedy of the "Massacre" so quickly into a victory 
for the people are worthy of all admiration. The re- 
strained fairness of the town in dealing with the soldiers 
who fired the fatal shots is perhaps even more admi- 
rable. Their trial was postponed till time had cooled 
the immediate passions of revenge. Surely it was a 
high spirit of justice which brought the patriots, John 
Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., to the legal defence of 
Captain Preston and his offending soldiers. Robert 
Treat Paine, no less allied to the patriot cause, con- 
ducted the prosecution. But Adams and Ouincy se- 
cured acquittal for Preston and for all but two of his 
soldiers. These, convicted of manslaughter, were 
merely branded in the hand, and released. 

Happily, on this occasion the voice of Sam Adams 
was not heeded ; his counsel was for an earlier trial and 



An ASSOCIATION, 

PROPOSED TO THE 

LOYAL CITIZENS. 



yt GREEJBLE to ibe Proclamation ijfued by His. Excellency tbc 
^l Honorable Major-General WILL I AM HOWE, Commander in 
Chief of His Majejly's Forces, Uc Uc. ^c. 

WE, His Majedy's loyal Subjedls of the Town of BoJIon, being 
fehfible of the Duty incumbent on us, " to do every thing in 
our Power, to fupport Order and good Government, as well as 
to contribute our Aid. to the internal Security of the Town ;" — N O W 
take this Opportunity to profefs our firm Allegiance to His Majedy, and 
entire Obedience to His Government and Laws. 

From a Difpofition to cortt'j'inue quiet and obedient Subjefls, we 
have gefteriUy neglefted. tbci ^^f Arms while tbofc of diJerenc 
Charafters and Sentiments, Hirvtri/cn diligently endeavouring to improve 
themfelves in that A'rr. Upon thcfc Principles, we have remained in, or 
fled to, this Town: Neither do we wifh or defign to leave it, 

W E confider itasour flrongeft Duty to contribute our Aid in Promoting 
the Peace, Order and Security of the Town ; and are willing to be eiti- 
ployed, to thefe good Purpofes, in the Ways and Means fuited to our Ca- 
pacities. TO THAT END, we chearfully accept the Offers of his Ex- 
cellency, and NOW VOLUNTARILY ASSOCIATE, for the Purpofes 
mentioned ii\ liis Proclamation ; hereby Proraifing, " that fqch of us as 
he (hall think proper, or able to perform the Duties therein required, will 
beformed into Companies, as therein mentioned: And will, to theutmofl 
of our Power, faithfully perform thofe Services, axidpumf^ually difcharge 
the Trufts repofcd m us. And, mat fuch as are not able to go through 
ihofe Duties^ will freely contribute our Proportions, according to our 
Abilities, to raife a Sum of Money for promoting this falutary Purpofe, to 
be applied to the Ufe of thofe, who are able, in fuch Manner as the 
General, or thofe he may appoint, may think proper. 



Broadside in Response to General Howe's Proclamation calling 
UPON Boston Tories to organize for Preservation of Order and 
Good Government. 

In possession of the Boston Public Library. 



98 BOSTON 

a severer verdict. It remained for him, however, as we 
shall see, to speak the important word which opened 
the Boston Tea Party. And it was he who told the 
private emissary of General Gage, tempting him with 
promises of royal favor if he would take a less aggres- 
sive course : " Sir, I trust I have long since made 
my peace with the King of kings. No personal con- 
sideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous 
cause of my country. Tell Governor Gage it is the 
advice of Samuel Adams to him, no longer to insult 
the feelings of an exasperated people." 

It was not till May of 1774 that Gage, as military 
governor, superseded Hutchinson, the last of the civil 
chief magistrates of royal appointment. As Otis and 
Adams stand out as representatives of the American side 
of the conflict, the figure of Hutchinson may fairly be 
regarded as typical of all that was best in the native 
Tory element. It is no longer a heresy in America 
to regard this element as justified by something other 
than a purblind conservatism. After a cause is lost it 
grows easier to see the good in those who have sup- 
ported it, and to give them credit for sincerity in their 
way of looking at things. Certainly the later American 
students of Revolutionary history have done Governor 
Hutchinson full justice as a man of honest patriotism 
arrayed on the side where he and some of his fellows 
thought the right and the best interest of the colonies 
were to be found. They would be ungrateful his- 
torians who should fail to thank him for his invaluable 
History of Massachusetts Bay. With the thanks must 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 99 

be mingled some compassion for the small comfort his 
loyalty to the crown ever brought him. It was indeed 
a thankless task to rule a people of whom one of their 
descendants could say with a measure of truth : " It 
must be frankly admitted that if the mother country 
had really in right and reason any prerogative authority 
over us, we were not only indocile, but stiffly self-willed, 
refractory, and in fact rebellious." 

The circumstances following the passage of the 
Stamp Act in 1765 show, perhaps better than any 
other, what Hutchinson, then lieutenant-governor, had 
to deal with in the way of popular opposition. In 
England it was urged, not wholly without fairness, that 
the people of America should assume their share of a 
burden of debt incurred in defending them against the 
French and Indians. It was not recognized that the 
local legislatures might have determined better than 
Parliament the amount of the tax and the measures for 
collecting it. Hutchinson himself, be it said, called 
his Maker to witness that he did everything in his 
power to prevent the passage of the obnoxious Act. 
Yet it was passed. The news of it reached Boston in 
April. By way of celebrating the birthday of the 
Prince of Wales in August, the " Sons of Liberty " 
flocked to the Liberty Tree, opposite the foot of the 
present Boylston Street, hanged in effigy Hutchinson's 
brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, distributer of stamps, 
and suspended beside him, in derision of the Earl of 
Bute, prime minister of England, an old boot from 
which the unmistakable symbol of head and horns 



lOO 



BOSTON 




The Hutchinson House, Garden Court Street, North End. 



peered out. Twelve days later, August 26, 1765, a 
mob plundered the house of Benjamin Hallowell, 
comptroller of customs, and when with the help of his 
wine-cellar they "ripened in ebriety " — to use the 
Lieutenant-governor's own delightful phrase — they 
rushed on to the house of Hutchinson himself. " One 
of the best finished houses in the Province," as a letter 
of Hutchinson's describes the issue of that night — 
" had nothing remaining but the bare walls and floor. 
Not content with tearing off all the wainscot and hang- 
ings, and splitting the door to pieces, they beat down 
the partition walls ; and although that alone cost them 
near two hours, they cut down the cupola or lanthorn, 
and they began to take the slate and boards from the 
roof, and were prevented only by the approaching day- 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON loi 

light from a total demolition of the building." From 
Governor Bernard's proclamation we learn, moreover, 
that all the contents of the house, wearing apparel, 
jewels, wine and liquors, plate, money to the amount 
of ^9°^ sterling, were destroyed and stolen. In the 
general ruin disappeared also many valuable papers 
intended for use in Hutchinson's history of the prov- 
ince. In the winter of 1900 a great black glass bottle 
of unusual shape was displayed in a Boston curiosity 
shop as a relic of the sack of Hutchinson's house. The 
bottle — if it was what it pretended to be — had sur- 
vived one hundred and thirty-five years. The spirits 
it once contained, and the still more precious docu- 
ments and manuscripts of their common owner, pre- 
sumably shared in 1765 the lot of perishable things. 

It was of no practical service to Hutchinson that 
on the day after his house was destroyed the better 
element of the town expressed itself forcibly in town- 
meeting in condemnation of the outrage, or that the 
Stamp Act was subsequently repealed, to the great 
delight of the people both in Boston and in London. 
It mattered not that Franklin, by securing and giving 
forth private letters which Hutchinson had written to 
England against the popular cause, brought upon him- 
self in London the bitterest charges of unscrupulous 
dealings. In the eyes of his own people Hutchinson 
was made by every circumstance to appear a traitor. 
After General Gage, supported by his army, became 
military governor in May of 1774, the last of the civil 
magistrates sailed away to England, on the first of 



I02 BOSTON 

June, regarding himself as an exile. In the mother- 
country he wrote the pathetic words, " I had rather 
die in a little country farmhouse in New England than 
in the best nobleman's seat in Old England, and have 
therefore given no ear to any proposal of settling here." 
Yet in Old England he died, homesick and shattered, 
three years before the Revolution of which he had 
tried to check the beginnings was ended. 

To carry to completeness our plan of looking at 
separate personages of the Revolutionary period in 
Boston, a long gallery even of partial portraits would 
be required. Tories and patriots with equal claims to 
New England inheritances, would face each other now 
as of old. On the one side of the wall John Adams, 
shrewd and effective, Josiah Ouincy, Jr., and Joseph 
Warren, the young impulsive spokesman of a nation 
waiting to be born, would look across at such loyal 
"prerogative men" as Timothy Ruggles and Andrew 
Oliver on the other. The distinguished form and face 
of John Hancock, whose wealth and personal grace 
made him everywhere a commanding figure, ready at 
the proper moment to write his name where all subse- 
quent generations must read it, would stand forth 
conspicuous. Others, great and small, would take 
their historic places in the picturesque assemblage. 
But in the perspective of great events, the person 
becomes of smaller consequence than the thing with 
which he had to do. Thus for a time Boston itself 
becomes the central figure of the story. 

The Committee of Correspondence, proposed by 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 103 

Samuel Adams in November of 1772, and immedi- 
ately created by the town-meeting, was essentially the 
expression of the town spirit. Before long indeed it 
became the local government, taking the empty place 
of the chartered authorities thrust aside in the general 
upheaval. Its chief service, however, like that of the 
similar Committee of the Massachusetts Assembly, 
was to keep the other towns of the province and the 
other provinces informed of the progress of the strug- 
gle between the crown and its New England subjects. 
The importance of the whole network of Committees 
of Correspondence in placing the scattered resistance 
of the colonies upon a common ground, and in prepar- 
ing the way for the Continental Congress has never yet 
been overrated by the historians who have treated the 
subject in detail. 

As a town, also, Boston found itself called upon to 
deal with the difficult problems presented by the harm- 
less commodity of tea. Among the articles taxed by 
the Townshend Revenue Bill, passed by Parliament in 
1767, was tea. There appeared no better way to avoid 
paying these taxes than to refrain from buying and 
using the articles taxed. Non-importation agreements 
were so general and so faithfully fulfilled that British 
commerce began to feel their baleful effect. The wear- 
ing of black for mourning was abandoned because black 
cloth was imported. That there might be more wool 
for home manufacture of clothing, lambs were spared, 
and the people ate mutton or went without the flesh 
of sheep. With the hope of mending matters Lord 



WILLIAM JACKSON, 

^ I M PO RT E R;2X. the 
BRAZEN HEAD, 

North Side nf the TOWN-HOUSE, 

and Opfyfitc the Toim-PiDfip^ hi 
Coni-i?!ll, B O S T O X. 



It is defircJ that the Son's and 
Daughti-rs of L I B E RT.7\ 
would not: hv\\ an)' one thinji, r^^ 
hup, tor in To doing they will br> 
Difgraci- ujx)n //v;;//^7;v,s and the-. 
Foffcntv, for ever and ever, AAiKN 



Broadside kn lObSEbSioN of ihe Boston Public Library. 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 105 

North proposed in 1769, and carried out in 1770, a 
plan to remove the detested taxes — on everything but 
tea. To abandon that would have been to admit the 
possibility that the principle for which the colonists 
were standing out was right. That the people of 
Boston were contending for a principle may be inferred 
from the estimate that in 1768 fifteen hundred families 
out of the two thousand in the town had totally given 
up the use of tea. The most patriotic palate could 
hardly have found a pleasing substitute in the " Liberty 
Tea" made from the leaves of the four-leaved loose- 
strife, basted with the juice from the boiled stalks of 
the same plant, and dried in an oven. Yet women, 
young and old, were as ready as the men to register 
themselves on signed agreements as total abstainers 
from the more grateful cup. 

When even the powerful East India Company found 
itself embarrassed by an excess of unsold tea in its 
English storehouses, its influence was brought to bear 
upon Parliament, and permission was granted in 1773 
for the export of tea to America without the payment 
of duties in England. Thus, it was hoped, the price 
could be made so low in the colonies that the tempta- 
tion to buy could not be resisted. Yet this was neither 
the first nor the last time that English authorities have 
failed to realise how truly the British quality of per- 
sistence had come to the new world with its settlers. 

Informed that tea-ships were on the way to Boston, 
and that tea commissioners or consignees had been ap- 
pointed to receive their contents, the people promptly 



io6 



BOSTON 



and squarely faced the problem before them. The 
tea commissioners were called upon to resign, and 
refused. The owner and the captain of the first vessel 
to arrive, November 28, 1773, were told that her entry 

at the custom-house would be 
made at their peril. A few 
days later two other ships ap- 
peared. The town-meeting, 
directed by the Committee of 
Correspondence, was deter- 
mined that the tea should go 
back, and that without paying 
a penny of duty. Only with 
clearance papers could the ves- 
sels legally leave Boston har- 
bor and enter an English port. 
The collector of customs re- 
fused these papers, nor would 
Governor Hutchinson grant 
the pass which would have 
permitted the vessels to sail. Furthermore the con- 
tents of the ships, if not discharged within twenty days 
of arrival, were liable to confiscation. If ever men 
were between the devil and the deep sea, the con- 
signees and masters of the tea-ships must have felt 
themselves in such a plight. On the afternoon of the 
1 6th of December the Old South Meeting-house held 
what it could of the crowd of seven thousand which 
had gathered from town and country. Before the 
speeches of Samuel Adams, ^uincy, and others were 




Francis Rotch, Owner of 

Tea-ship Dartmouth. 

Silhouette in possession of the 

Bostonian Society. 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 107 

ended, a few candles were lighted in the darkening 
building. At six the owner of the ship Dartmouth 
entered and announced the Governor's final refusal to 
permit the vessel to sail. From that moment the 
working-out of a carefully planned programme was ap- 
parent. " This meeting can do no more to save the 
country," said Adams. A war-whoop sounded from 
the porch, and a band of perhaps fifty men dressed 
as Indians and known to history as "the Mohawks " 
hurried from the meeting-house to Griffin's (afterwards 
Liverpool) Wharf, where the tea-ships lay. Within 
three hours 342 chests of tea were thrown overboard 
without noise or opposition. All the scenes of the 
strange little drama had been so well arranged that 
when the play was done actors and spectators returned 
to their homes as soberly as if they had taken part in 
nothing more theatric than a Thursday lecture. But 
Paul Revere rode fast with the news of it to New 
York and Philadelphia, which shared the joy of 
Boston that since the law had served the people's 
purpose so poorly, they had taken it into their own 
hands with a dignity and effectiveness that left little to 
be wished. 

If the whole tea affair best illustrates the manner of 
Boston in dealing with its problems, the immediate 
action of the British government shows no less clearly 
how it sought to discipline its troublesome dependency. 
In the spring of 1774 Parliament passed the Boston 
Port Bill whereby all privileges of Boston as a seaport 
were annulled. To say nothing of distant commerce, 



io8 BOSTON 

every communication by water, even with Charlestown 
and Dorchester, was cut off. The seat of government 
was moved to Salem, and Marblehead became the port 
of entry for the district. Swift on the heels of the 
Port Bill came the Regulation Acts, providing for 
the appointment by King or Governor of local officers 
hitherto elected, abolishing town-meetings except under 
specific conditions, transferring to Nova Scotia or Eng- 
land the trial of officials charged with capital offences, 
and quartering troops on the towns of the province. 
It is not surprising that General Gage, fresh in the post 
of military governor, found the laws hard to enforce 
— even with royal troops behind him. 

" We were not the revolutionists," declared the 
orator of the day at Lexington a century after the 
battle. " The King and Parliament were the Revo- 
lutionists. They were the radical innovators. We 
were the conservators of existing institutions." The 
old form of local government gone, the Committee of 
Correspondence stood ready to fill the gap. How 
the people bore their part under the new order Lord 
Percy, stationed in Boston under General Gage, clearly 
saw. " They say," he wrote home to England, " that 
since the town-meetings are forbid by the act, they 
shall not hold them ; but as they do not see any 
mention made of county meetings, they shall hold 
them for the future. They therefore go a mile out 
of town, do just the same business there they formerly 
did in Boston, call it a county meeting, and so elude 
the act." Thus at Dedham and Milton, in Septem- 




Christ Church, Salem Street. 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 



1 1 1 



ber of 1774, were passed the Suffolk Resolves, a docu- 
ment looking as frankly toward a broken allegiance 
— broken first, it held, through the actions of Parlia- 
ment — as the later Declaration of Independence 
itself. By that time there was a Continental Congress 
which could receive with hearty 
approval these Resolves, car- 
ried to Philadelphia by the 
indefatigable Paul Revere. In 
the next month there was a 
Provincial Congress of Massa- 
chusetts, preparing definitely 
for military defence, and urg- ^ 
ing the towns to form compa- 
nies of Minute Men. The 
fire was laid ; only flint and 
tinder were needed to light it. 
For the supply of additional 
fuel — there was the increase 
and the conduct of the British 
troops stationed in Boston. The Puritan town was 
the last place in which, for the peace of its inhabitants, 
flagrant camp followers from England should have 
appeared. Furthermore, " on Sundays," says John 
Fiske, " the soldiers would race horses on the Common, 
or play Yankee Doodle just outside the church-doors 
during services." In a contemporary record one may 
read of the fate of an honest countryman who came 
from Billerica into Boston in March of 1775. A British 
soldier sold him a worthless gun. Then the country- 




Paui. Revere. 
Bust by Robert Kraus. 



112 BOSTON 

man was seized for breaking the law against trading 
with soldiers. The next morning he was stripped, 
tarred, and feathered. With the drum and fifes of the 
47th Regiment playing Yankee Doodle, a number 
of officers, sailors, and negroes thereupon paraded him 
through the principal streets as a spectacle, labelled 
"American Liberty, or a Specimen of Democracy." 
All this may have been excellent fooling for his 
Majesty's soldiery, but at the same time it was pre- 
cisely the kind of kindling which added brightness to 
the fires of Lexington and Bunker Hill. 

The lighting of these fires, with flint-lock and 
powder, belongs more than almost any other matters 
of local record in America, to national history. So 
far as Boston had to do with the embattled farmers 
of Middlesex, it is perhaps enough that she sent forth 
Paul Revere to prepare them for Lord Percy's troops 
which also issued from Boston and so rapidly re- 
turned to it. Once safely back in the town, they 
were to remain there, through the vigilance of their 
American besiegers, for eleven long months after the 
battle of Lexington ; and the people of Boston, mili- 
tary and civilian, must still be our chief concern. 

Of course the prime exploit of the military portion 
of the population was the costly battle of Bunker Hill 
in Charlestown, two months after Lexington. General 
Burgoyne's private report of the " victory " to a friend 
in England sounds almost prophetic of a South African 
despatch of 1900. Of the list of killed and wounded 
he said, " If fairly given, it amounts to no less than 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 113 

ninety-two officers, many of them an irreparable loss — 
a melancholy disproportion to the number of private 
soldiers." The victory won the British a square mile 
of land in Charlestown ; but it was not of the sort to 
be " followed up." Indeed it did not even raise the 



I PROSPECT HILL. 

i I. Seven Dollars a Month. — — 

f II. Freth Provifions, and in Plenty. — — 
I III. Health. _ ^ — — 

^ IV. Freedom, Eafe, Affluence and a good Farm. 



BUNKER'S HILL. 

I. Three Pence a Day. 

II. Rotten Salt Pork. 

III. The Scurvy. 

IV. Slaveiy, Beggary and Want 



Handbill circulated by American Sentries and the Wind in the 
British Lines at Charlestown Neck. 

siege. Nor could it have brought either to the 
Americans or to the British within the town any sense 
of security in their situation. 

The Americans whose sympathies were with the army 
of which Washington, as commander-in-chief of the 
Continental forces, became the head at Cambridge, 
July 5, 1775, found themselves in perhaps the most 
difficult situation of all. In their old homes, cut off 
from their friends without, they were amongst strangers 
and enemies. Naturally many of them wished to 
leave the town, even at the loss of treasured posses- 
sions ; and terms to this end were made with General 
Gage. But the civilian Tories of Boston — and the 
soldiers, too, it may be supposed — felt safer from 
bombardment while the place was known to shelter 



114 



BOSTON 




General Gage's Headquarters, Hull Street, North End. 

many friends of the American cause. Accordingly 
Gage's terms for their departure were so modified as 
to make egress a most difficult matter. In spite of 
all the obstacles, however, it is estimated that before 
the end of June not far from twelve thousand persons 
had managed to quit the beleaguered town. A census 
taken by Gage's order in July, showed that the remain- 
ing civilians numbered 6573, and the soldiery 13,500. 
For all these, and for the Tories from without, who 
sought and won admission within the lines of siege, 
bitter times were in store. 

The question of food supply was vital enough. 
Beyond what the promontory itself could afford. 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 115 

reliance had to be placed upon seizures from the har- 
bor islands and the arrivals of supply ships fortunate 
enough to escape the Yankee sailors lying in wait in 
Massachusetts Bay. In May came one of the disas- 
trous fires from which Boston has periodically suffered. 
In November still another of the plagues of old Boston 
appeared, — an epidemic of smallpox. Scantily pre- 
pared for a New England winter, hundreds of the 
poorer people were banished by military order to 
Chelsea and Point Shirley. The good people left in 
the town had the misery of seeing their houses of 
worship desecrated or destroyed. One was used as a 
stable ; two became barracks, and two storehouses 
for provisions. Another, torn down, with a hundred 
wooden dwelling-houses, met the fate of fire-wood. 
The Old South went the way of a riding-school for 
dragoons, and in Timothy Newell's diary it is recorded 
that " the beautiful carved pew with the silk furniture 
of Deacon Hubbard's was taken down and carried to 

's house by an officer and made a hog-stye." 

Dear as the churches in the eyes of the people was 
the Liberty Tree. Its fame had spread so far that 
even in England a friend of the colonies, dying at about 
this time, left a will devising a comfortable fortune to 
two persons of his acquaintance if they would surely 
bury his body in the shadow of the Tree. Through- 
out the ten years since Andrew Oliver's effigy had 
hung from its branches, it had been the rallying-point 
of Liberty. It had become a symbol — like the mace 
to Cromwell, the Bastille to the mob of Paris — and 



ii6 BOSTON 

was doomed. In August of 1775 a party of British 
soldiers proceeded to do away with it. " After a long 
spell of laughing and grinning, sweating and swear- 
ing, and foaming with malice diabolical" — wrote an 
American journalist of the time — "they cut down a 
tree, because it bore the name of liberty." In the 
record a week later that one of the soldiers " in attempt- 
ing to dismantle it of one of its branches, fell on the 
pavement, by which he was instantly killed," the note 
of triumph is not hard to detect. 

It were hard-hearted, however, to grudge the soldiers 
of General Gage all their diversions. The Constitu- 
tional Gazette of October i, 1775, quoted the saying 
that his army was then divided into three companies : 
" the first company is under ground ; the second is 
above ground ; the third is in the hospital ; and the 
general has received express orders from home for 
the second and third companies to march and follow 
the first." If the true plight of the men was even 
suggested by this hyperbole, sut^ely the officers had 
need of all such cheer as the place could afford. It 
may be that some of them took comfort in the song 
they sang about the wife the "Yankee king" had 
married, after eluding capture on the night of the 
march to Lexington and making his way to the Conti- 
nental Congress in Philadelphia: — 

" Madam Hancock dreamt a dream : 

She dreamt she wanted something ; 
She dreamt she wanted a Yankee king. 
To crown with a pumpkin." 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 117 

For the more definite entertainment of the officers the 
Tory ladies in Boston did what they could. Dances 
and assemblies were held in the Concert Hall ; and 
the very cradle of liberty — Faneuil Hall itself — was 
devoted to amateur theatricals acted by officers and 
the less prudish of the ladies. General Burgoyne, 
who with Clinton and Howe had come to the relief 
of Gage in the early days of the siege, directed a series 
of these performances in the autumn, and wrote pro- 
logue and epilogue in verse for the tragedy of Zara. 
On a January evening of 1776, when Gage had been 
recalled and Howe had held the command for three 
months, a farce, The Blockade of Boston^ was pre- 
sented at Faneuil Hall. Howe was one of the audi- 
ence amused by the appearance on the stage of a 
caricatured Washington, bearing a rusty sword and 
attended by a grotesque squire. While these two 
figures held the boards, a sergeant burst into the hall 
shouting, " The Yankees are attacking our works on 
Bunker's Hill." Those who took the interruption 
for a part of the play were soon undeceived by the 
sharp command of Howe, "Officers, to your alarm 
posts ! " With the crowding of the doors, the shriek- 
ing and fainting of women, the performance came to 
a sudden end; and over in Charlestown a glow of fire 
showed where some Yankee soldiers had succeeded in 
burning a few houses, and in capturing five and killing 
one of their enemies. The Blockade of Boston was 
a bit of realism in advance of its time. 

While these by-plays of war were going forward. 



ii8 BOSTON 

Washington at Cambridge, and Howe in Boston, were 
struggling with its problems on a large scale. Each 
felt the weakness of his position, and feared assault 
from the other. Washington's problem lay in organ- 
izing what he called his " army of undisciplined hus- 
bandmen," and in the poverty of his ammunition. 
When complaints of inaction arose, he could not even 
silence them, for fear of revealing his true weakness. 
For Howe the problem was in part geographical and 
in part — like Washington's — a matter of supplies. 
For him and for his predecessor the home government 
could or would do much less than hope and necessity 
demanded. So the months dragged on, neither com- 
mander caring or daring to make the first important 
move. 

Unimportant skirmishes were frequent throughout 
the course of the siege. But it was not till the night 
of the 4th of March, 1776, that Washington could 
carry out his cherished, hazardous plan of intrenching 
guns and troops on Dorchester Heights — now South 
Boston — commanding the harbor and a vulnerable 
part of the town. The movement, which the British 
themselves might have achieved more easily, took 
Howe completely by surprise. When he woke on 
the morning of March 5, the anniversary of the 
" Massacre" of 1770, it was plain that if the Heights 
could not be wrested from Washington's men, Boston 
must be abandoned. A large detachment of British 
troops embarked before nightfall to drive the Conti- 
nentals from their place of vantage. This time, how- 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 



119 



ever, the winds which had destroyed an armada fought 
against England — and while the British boats were 
driven whither they would not, the Americans gained 
time to fortify their new posi- 
tion against all possibilities 
of capture. The inevitable 
end of the British occupa- 
tion of Boston was clearly in 
sight. 

It was not wholly a simple 
matter for Washington and 
Howe to arrive at the tacit 
understanding that if his Maj- 
esty's troops would quietly 
withdraw from the town 
there would be no bombard- 
ment. Direct communication 
between the two generals 
was impossible when one of 
them would address the other 
by no military title conferred 
by an upstart congress, and 
that other, the victor, was, 
by the law he recognized, 
no longer plain Mr. Wash- 
ington. When a British offi- 
cer afterward suggested that 
" George Washington, etc., etc., etc.," would include 
everything^ Washington shrewdly objected that it might 
no less truly include anything. Nevertheless it was 




Tower on Dorchester Heights 
commemorating the evacu- 
ATION OF Boston. 



I20 BOSTON 

indirectly arranged that if the British would leave the 
town intact, they might do so unharmed. 

"It was not like breaking up a camp, where every 
man knows his duty," wrote one who took part in the 
evacuation ; " it was like departing your country, with 
your wives, your servants, your household furniture, 
and all your incumbrances." To these impedimenta 
the large number ot Tory citizens, with everything to 
lose if they or their possessions should be left behind, 
added much. Transports which should have carried 
the King's goods were filled with their household wares. 
Aside from all this lifeless freight, there were the mili- 
tary, nearly nine thousand in number, and eleven hun- 
dred Tories and their families to be carried away in the 
seventy-eight available ships and transports. The sight 
of Washington's batteries kept reminding them all that 
they were not to loiter. Cannon and stores which 
could not be embarked must not be left to enrich the 
Continentals. Even General Gage's chariot was tipped 
off the end of a wharf into the harbor. Confusion 
indescribable was everywhere. Yet in twelve days the 
sorry fleet set sail for Halifax. To this day the good 
Bostonian, seeing the flags flying each 17th of March, 
tells his children that it is not the feast of Saint 
Patrick, but the final departure of British troops from 
Boston streets and Common, which has this public 
sign. 

There was little to relieve the gloom of the British 
departure — and much to temper the joy of the Ameri- 
can recovery. The deserted town, where the entering 



REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON 



121 



soldiers were followed before long by the civilians, had 
its story clearly written on its face. On every side 
was havoc. Disease was in the air. Torture-traps 
and obstacles stood in the way of the first comers. 
There were sorrowful reunions of families, which now 
fell to counting their losses — of property and lives. 
When Washington 
himself came over 
from Dorchester in a 
boat on the i8th, and 
dined with James 
Bowdoin, Jr., we are 
told that no greater 
luxury could be set 
before him than a 
piece of salted beef. 
Yet the first great vic- 
tory was won. If Bos- 
ton for fifteen years 
had been the chief 
thorn in the side of the 
English colonial authorities, she had paid full measure 
for the distinction, and had earned the immunity from 
the uses of a battleground which she enjoyed through 
all the remainder of the war. 

When the news of the Declaration of Independence 
reached Boston, on July 18, the town sheriff read the 
instrument to the assembled people. Then many such 
emblems of royalty as the arms from the Town House 
were brought together and publicly burned. The next 




Gold Medal commemorating Washing- 
ton's Victory. 

In possession of the Boston Public Library. 



122 BOSTON 

year the Fourth of July itself was celebrated with a 
parade, a sermon before the Legislature, a public 
dinner, and much cannonading. In the summer of 
1778 a French fleet came into the harbor, and though 
the officers received less attention than Mrs. John 
Adams thought their due. General Heath, command- 
ing the American troops stationed at Boston, did what 
was fitting, and John Hancock gave a "superb ball" 
in their honor at Concert Hall. The building and 
fitting out of ships, and the arrival from time to time 
of British prizes taken by Yankee vessels, marked the 
gradual return of Boston to its place as the chief sea- 
port of the new country struggling into existence. 
But the war itself was elsewhere. To its conduct by 
Congress, at sea and in the field, Boston gave of its 
leaders — the Adamses, Hancock, and others — and 
of its sailors and soldiers. Its people were ready to 
rejoice at the good tidings of the surrender of Corn- 
wallis. A sentence of Samuel Breck's brings back the 
scene on the Common, when " u huge pyramid of 
cord-wood, fifty feet high, was piled up in the middle 
of the green and fired at night." With the dying of 
this fire Revolutionary Boston passes out of view. In 
its place we see the capital town, no longer of colony 
or province, but of Massachusetts, ready to take its 
place in the sisterhood of sovereign states. 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 




reader of Hawthorne needs 
be reminded of the haunt- 
re of" Howe's Masquerade," 
" the funeral procession of 
thority in New England " 
own the steps of the Prov- 
ince House into the dark- 
ness of the night. It is 
one of those scenes, made 
for and by the pen of 
Hawthorne, in which the 
colors of imagination 
paint essential truths. 
With the passing of the 
royal authority the old order underwent its final change. 
In the train of the royal authority departed from 
Boston, as we have seen, more than a thousand Tories, 
the men and women, in many instances, who had been 
the foremost persons of the place. The rank and file 
of the democracy in revolt remained, and, with its 
handful of leaders, became the democracy in control. 
But the places hitherto filled by men of wealth and 
influence were not to stand vacant. The aristocracy 
of the New England towns in general, unlike that of 



John Hancock's Tea-kettle and 
Money Trunk. 

In possession of tlie Bostonian Society. 



124 BOSTON 

Boston, had been for the most part in opposition to 
the crown. From the country, then, came a new ele- 
ment of leadership. The confiscated houses of the 
royalist refugees were in the market, at low prices, and 
soon were occupied by families whose names have 
long been a part of Boston history. To quote di- 
rectly Mr. Lodge's catalogue of this peaceful invasion, 
there were " the Adamses and Fisher Ames of Nor- 
folk, the Prescotts from Middlesex, and the Sullivans 
from New Hampshire ; while from Essex, most pro- 
lific of all, came the Parsonses, Pickerings, Lees, 
Jacksons, Cabots, Lowells, Grays, and Elbridge 
Gerry." Thus for all that Boston lost in the de- 
parture of its Tory gentry, it gained perhaps more 
in this accession of new blood, racier of the soil, 
and quickening the life of the larger town with all 
the sturdy New England standards of a stock which 
had flourished in conditions calling for the best 
strength of manhood. 

But the newcomers did not all appear immediately 
upon the scene, and for the management of town and 
state affairs the people turned instinctively to their 
old leaders. The local government, interrupted by the 
King's troops, returned at once to the hands of the 
town-meeting. In 1779, ^^^^^ years before the treaty 
of peace was signed, a convention met in Boston to 
form a state government for Massachusetts. Its pro- 
visions were adopted at the beginning of 1780, and 
John Hancock, by far the most conspicuous figure of 
the town and the state, was chosen the first governor. 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 125 

From this time until his death in 1793, excepting for 
the two years of 1785 and 1786, he was annually re- 
elected to the governorship. By his side, as lieuten- 
ant-governor stood, as of old, that tried servant of the 
people, Samuel Adams, who succeeded him in the 
chief magistracy. 

Through the daily life of John Hancock one may 
gain many glimpses of the life of Boston in his day. 
By the very law of contrasts John Adams's disapproval 
of Hancock's lavish entertainments, and the resulting 
estrangement between the two friends, indicate the 
general simplicity of living. The common friend 
who brought them together again found it necessary 
to defend Hancock's mode of life in print as " impor- 
tant to public cheerfulness." Against the reputed 
charge of John Adams that Hancock was but an 
"empty barrel," Mr. Lodge arrays the significant 
words : " He stands out with a fine show of lace and 
velvet and dramatic gout, a real aristocrat, shining 
and resplendent against the cold gray background of 
every-day life in the Boston of the days after the 
Revolution, when the gay official society of the Prov- 
ince had been swept away." There is indeed a win- 
ning picturesqueness in the figure of the handsome 
host borne by attendants into the dining hall large 
enough for fifty or sixty guests, and reproving the 
servant who drops a cut-glass epergne : " James, break 
as much as you please, but don't make such a con- 
founded noise about it." 

Of the "dramatic gout," two episodes in the public 



126 BOSTON 

career of Hancock yield sufficient illustration. In the 
Life of Josiah ^incy by his son Edmund, it is 
related that Hancock made his affliction " an excuse 
for doing as he pleased in political as well as social life. 
Thus, when the adoption of the Federal Constitution 
hung doubtful in the balance in the Massachusetts 
convention of 1788, the gout was made the convenient 
reason for his staying away, until he was made to see 
that his indecision must cease, and he interfere to 
secure the ratification. My father was in the gallery 
of the Old South Church at the time, and used to 
describe how Hancock, wrapt in flannels, was borne 
in men's arms up the broad aisle, when he made the 
speech which caused the Constitution to be accepted 
by nineteen majority." It is worth while to note in 
passing, the influence which brought Samuel Adams to 
the support of the Federal Constitution, of which at 
first he was an opponent. Paul Revere and other 
representatives of the Boston mechanics bore him the 
report of an enthusiastic meeting of their fellows in 
favor of the federal scheme. The voice of the people 
was for him the voice to heed — and thus his influence 
was secured for the winning side. 

It was the year after Massachusetts gave her vote 
for the Federal Constitution, that is, in 1789, that 
Washington paid his memorable visit to Boston; and 
it was then that Hancock made a second effective use 
of his gout. At the town line vv^here Washington was 
received, the selectmen and the sherifl^ representing the 
invalid governor quarrelled over the control of the pro- 




The Hancock House, Beacon Street. 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 129 

cession. Hancock's man, after threatening " to make 
a hole through " certain officials of the town, had his 
way. The resulting delay gave many persons what 
was called a " Washington cold." The first Presi- 
dent's progress through the street, which in different 
parts was called Orange, Newbury, and Marlborough, 
and from that time forth has borne the single name of 
Washington, was indeed triumphal. Crowds of cheer- 
ing people lined the way, near the end of which an 
elaborate arch of welcome was erected. At the State 
House Washington dismounted from his white charger, 
and took his place on a platform while a chorus sta- 
tioned in the arch near at hand sang an ode in his 
praise. When the shouting and the tumult died, 
where was Hancock? Holding himself to be chief 
of the local state, he felt that it was Washington's 
place as a visitor from abroad to come and pay him his 
respects — and so he waited. On the other hand 
Washington had never lacked a sense of his own 
dignity, and justly regarding the state of Massachu- 
setts as inferior to the Union of which he was presi- 
dent, he also waited. For a while it looked as if the 
visit so brilliantly begun might come to an uncomfort- 
able end. Just here it was that the gout was made to 
save the situation. There were those indeed who said 
that the state of Hancock's health was an all-sufficient 
excuse for his failure to greet the President. The com- 
mon belief, however, was, and is, that Hancock soon 
saw himself to be in the wrong, and the next day lay- 
ing hold on the best available excuse, had himself 



ijo BOSTON 

elaborately swathed and borne on the shoulders of 
attendants to Washington's lodgings, where he ex- 
plained away the apparent incivility to the satisfaction 
of all concerned. The President's visit, after this 
episode, went prosperously forward, and served to 
strengthen the popular loyalty to the federal party of 
which he was the acknowledged head. 

It is told of Hancock on the occasion of another 
distinguished visit — that of the French fleet of which 
he entertained the officers — that needing more milk 
than his own cows could supply, he gave orders for the 
milking of all the cows on the Common, regardless of 
ownership. The absence of all protest against such a 
proceeding bespoke an almost apostolic community of 
spirit and property. The people may well have re- 
joiced to feel themselves represented by their Governor 
and his lady, both at their own mansion and at the 
return entertainment on the flagship of the fleet. 

From the gentlemen of the French navy Hancock 
could turn with pleasure to one Balch, a Boston hatter, 
whose shop was a favorite lounging-place. Here the 
Governor bandied jokes with the hatter and his friends, 
and with mock seriousness discussed the puzzling prob- 
lems of his administration. One of the people again 
he seems to be while paying his fine for violating the 
Sunday law bv driving not directly home from church. 
Even so late as the time of Hancock's governorship — 
in the closing years of the eighteenth century — the 
Sunday customs retained much of their Puritanic 
rigor. To recall them is to remind ourselves of one 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 131 

of the most conspicuous social changes wrought by the 
century that followed. 

Under the laws which caused Hancock's arrest, it 
was not permitted to drive a hackney coach in or out 
of Boston between the Sunday hours of midnight and 
sunset without a warrant from a Justice of the Peace ; 
and during the hours of service no vehicle in the town 
was allowed to move faster than a walk. The enforce- 
ment in 1802 of the law against Sabbath-breakers for 
bathing at the foot of the Common called forth some 
verses in the Centinel^ which suggest that everybody in 
the town was not of one way of thinking : — 

** In Superstition's days, 'tis said. 
Hens laid two eggs on Monday, 
Because a hen would lose her head 
That laid an egg on Sunday. 

Now our wise rulers and the law 
Say none shall wash on Sunday ; 
So Boston folks must dirty go. 
And wash them twice on Monday." 

Outside of Boston this Sunday severity was prob- 
ably even greater than in the town itself. In Quincy, 
at the time of Lafayette's visit, when nearly a quarter 
of the nineteenth century was spent, the people stood 
silent as the beloved guest drove through the streets 
on Sunday ; decorum forbade a single cheer. When 
Samuel Breck in 1791 was called upon to meet his 
father one Sunday in Worcester, he anticipated trouble 
on the journey, "and determined" — as his RecoUec- 



132 BOSTON 

tions say — "to try what could be done under the 
assumed character of a Frenchman. Having a letter 
to deliver at the tavern nearest to the meeting-house, 
and to which I knew I should be sent in case ot arrest, 
1 affected not to understand English when I gave in 
the letter. The house of worship stood upon a hill, 
at the foot of which I saw the congregation descend- 
ing. In the very front came the deacon on horseback, 
with a long staff in his hands and his wife on a pillion 
behind. He ordered me to stop, and with a magis- 
terial air inquired why I travelled on the Lord's Day. 
I answered him in French, upon which he raised his 
voice to a pitch of authoritative anger and repeated 
his question. I replied by a string of French words 
and a shrug of the shoulders, significative of my 
ignorance of his question ; when, finding himself per- 
plexed, he motioned to me to go about my business." 
Less ingenuity was displayed by the judges of the 
Massachusetts court, travelling with the Attorney- 
General through the district of Maine before it was a 
state. To keep a court appointment these interpreters 
of the law were forced to ignore the statute against 
Sunday travel. Their train of carriages climbed the 
hill leading to the Freeport meeting-house while the 
good people of the village were within. The eyes of 
the warden, however, were alert, and the Sabbath- 
breakers found themselves promptly called to account. 
If they had heeded this officer, the matter might have 
ended there. But not so ; they drove on, and in due 
season the grand jury of Massachusetts, at the instance 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 133 

of the Freeport people, indicted them for their offence. 
It was only after a petition from the judges to the 
Legislature, and a full measure of public amusement, 
that the case was abandoned. 

For a contrast with present conditions correspond- 
ing to that which the Sunday customs afforded, we 
have to look at the beginnings of the drama in 
Boston. As early as 1750 "An Act to Prevent 
Stage Plays and other Theatrical entertamments " gave 
expression to the public sentiment which assured its 
enforcement. After the Revolution this law was re- 
enacted, in 1784. But the British officers who walked 
the boards of Faneuil Hall were not far in advance of 
a general interest in the theatre. A town-meeting in 
1 79 1, influenced by men of enlightened progress, 
called upon the Legislature to repeal the existing law. 
The Legislature refused — and in defiance of the statute 
the lovers of the drama proceeded to erect a stage and 
to open what they called the " New Exhibition Room " 
in Board Alley, now Hawley Street. Plays were ad- 
vertised as " moral lectures," illustrating this or that 
vice or virtue. Otway's Venice Preserved appeared as 
such a lecture in five parts, "in which the dreadful 
effects of conspiracy will be exemplified." To make 
sure, a little later, that the point of Macbeth should 
not be missed, it was introduced by "A Dialogue on 
the Horrid Crime of Murder, by Mr. and Mrs. 
Smith." Even such precautions, however, did not 
protect the people of the new playhouse from the 
consequences of defying the law. Governor Hancock 



134 BOSTON 

called the matter to the attention of the General Court, 
and on a night of December, 1792, a sheriff with a 
warrant for the arrest of one of the actors. Harper by 
name, suddenly appeared among the dramatis persons 
of the School for Scandal. The performance came to 
a sudden end, though the house could not be closed 
till a portrait of the Governor had been pulled down 
and trampled under foot by the young men of the 
audience who knew Hancock's attitude toward the 
theatre. " Late that same evening," to quote from 
Mr. Amory's Life of Hancock's Attorney-General, 
James Sullivan, " the governor was seated in his parlor 
surrounded by several gentlemen engaged in discuss- 
ing the subject of the arrest, when a noise in the hall 
attracted their attention. Upon opening the door, he 
found a crowd of persons, many of whom were sailors, 
who in reply to his inquiry as to the object of their 
visit, said that they came to know if it was his honor's 
wish that the playhouse should be pulled down." 
From such a course the Governor wisely dissuaded 
them. The next day it appeared clearly that the 
townspeople in general were not such conservatives 
as these seafaring men, for the dismissal of Harper 
after the hearing at Faneuil Hall, where it was argued 
that the warrant for his arrest was illegal, called forth 
enthusiastic applause. Stoutly arrayed with Hancock 
against the repeal of the law was Samuel Adams, who 
"thanked God," when Harrison Gray Otis took the 
same side of the controversy, " that there was one 
young man willing to step forth in the good old cause 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 



^35 



of morality and religion." Here, however, was a 
conservative cause which was doomed. Through the 
governorship of Adams, following Hancock's death in 
1793, the players had much to contend with. Yet it 
was in 1794 that the first true theatre in Boston, built 




The Federal Street Theatre, Corner of Federal and Franklin 

STREETS. 

on Federal Street from a classic design by Bulfinch, 
was opened; and by degrees from that time forth the 
prohibitory law passed through the stages of dead 
letter to repeal. It was this Federal Street Theatre 
in its early days which followed the significant prac- 
tice of closing its doors on the evening of the regular 
week-day service in the Boston churches. It may 
have been by such means that the local theatre took 
the first steps toward winning its place somewhat 
unusually near the heart of the people. 

But changes came, and have always come, slowly in 
Boston. The eighteenth century is said to have passed 
before the traces of the siege were entirely removed. 



136 BOSTON 

Meanwhile the energy and caution characteristic of the 
people were building a sure prosperity, to which a 
dignified local atmosphere gave a suitable background. 
It is usual to look for this dignity in the higher places, 
but signs of a sturdy independence pervading all classes 
of society are not wanting. There is indeed a world 
of suggestion in an incident related by William Tudor 
in his shrewd Letters from the Eastern States, published 
in 1820: "A few years ago, at the parade of the 
artillery election, which takes place on the common in 
Boston, some confusion took place as the close of the 
procession was entering the ground appropriated to 
the ceremony. The crowd was pressing very hard 
at the entrance, and the bar was put down before all 
the representatives had got in. Some of these called 
out to the officer who had charge of the passage, in a 
tone expressive of their claim to admission, IVe are 
representatives ! A man among the crowd immediately 
vociferated, in the same tone. We are the people them- 
selves ! " The joining of this spirit with a recognition 
of authority and leadership in those to whom they 
justly belonged augured well for the development of 
the town in the nineteenth century. 

In the more prosperous houses the formalities of 
life were carefully observed. Dress, furniture, and the 
table received their full share of attention, — though 
perhaps not that more abundant share which character- 
ized cities farther to the south. The spreading com- 
merce of the port brought, with furnishings and usages 
from foreign ports, a healthy modification of local 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 137 

habits. It savors perhaps quite as much of the time 
as of the place to find that in a representative family 
at the end of the eighteenth century the children were 
always expected to use the words " honored papa " 
and " honored mamma " in addressing their parents. 
There is a strongly local tint, however, in the little 
picture of 1806 and thereabouts which Dr. Hale has 
recently reproduced. It reveals Colonel Perkins, 
Harrison Gray Otis, William (" Billy ") Gray, and 
other leaders of commerce and affairs, going home 
from their offices to an eight o'clock breakfast, carry- 
ing on their arms the baskets filled at the Faneuil 
Hall market with provisions for a one o'clock dinner. 
The informality of such a custom finds its balance in 
the stately notice sent near the end of the old century 
to delinquent tax-payers : " The Town Treasurer pre- 
sents his most respectful compliments to those citizens 
who have tax-bills unpaid, and requests the favor of 
them to pay the same to the collectors immediately, as 
he has large drafts from the Selectmen and Overseers 
of the Poor in favor of mechanics, schoolmasters, and 
others, to whom, especially at the present season, 
money would be very acceptable." When such 
urbanity pervades a tax-bill, we may suspect that it 
stands for something in the life of the town to which 
the tax is due. 

An academic influence so near and pervasive as that 
of Harvard College could not but make itself felt at 
all stages of Boston history. In the years just before 
and after 1800 there were important outward evidences 



138 



BOSTON 



of this influence. It was a valuable and surely an 
academic impulse which led to the founding of the 
Massachusetts Historical Society, incorporated in 1794. 
To express the consciousness of local existence is for a 
town what the expression of one's individuality is to 
a man. In its proper work the Historical Society has 




The Tontine Crescent, Franklin Street. 



certainly exercised this function. In its very dwelling- 
places it has typified the development of Boston. 
What the Fenway, where its stately building now 
stands, is to the present city, Franklin Street and the 
Tontine Crescent were to Boston at the beginning of 
the nineteenth century. In the rooms over the arch- 
way leading into Arch Street at the centre of the 
delightful Crescent which the art of Bulfinch created 
for too short an existence, the Historical Society had 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 139 

its headquarters for the forty years before 1833, when 
it moved to the rooms in the granite building north 
of the King's Chapel burying-ground, occupied till the 
century was nearly ended. There is an abundance of 
history in the facts of local geography. 

Early in the new century came the Anthology Club, 
long extinct yet living in its diverse offspring, the 
Boston Athenaeum and the North American Re-view. 
The club took its name from a periodical, the Monthly 
Anthology^ a Magazine of Polite Literature^ which after 
a six months' career under its founder came in 1804 
into the control of a small body of young men, locally 
prominent in the ministry, the law, medicine, and 
scholarship. The little club met once a week, decided 
upon manuscripts, and had a simple supper and 
informal talk. The ten volumes which it issued are 
described by the historian of the Boston Athenaeum 
as " constituting one of the most lasting and honorable 
monuments of the taste and literature of the period. 
Its labors may be considered as a true revival of 
polite learning in this country, after that decay and 
neglect which resulted from the distractions of the 
Revolutionary War, and so forming an epoch in the 
intellectual history of the United States." When this 
Monthly Anthology expired, its place was taken, after 
the interval of a few years, by the North American 
Review and Miscellaneous Journal., edited at first by 
one of the Anthology Club, who looked to his former 
associates as his chief contributors. Beginning as a 
bi-monthly, the North American soon became the 



I40 BOSTON 

quarterly which, for a large portion of the nineteenth 
century, expressed the best American thought. The 
"Old North" — not the present New York monthly 
— was as truly a Boston institution as the Old South 
itself. 

For that institution which has never departed from 
Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Anthology Club 
was also responsible. The club, we are informed, was 
not more than twenty days old when it passed a vote 
to form a library. From this beginning the Athenaeum, 
incorporated February 13, 1807, took its being. The 
modern public library was then a thing far in the 
future. A public museum of fine arts was even more 
remote. Because the Athenaeum was a private institu- 
tion it did not fail to render a public service both with 
books and with pictures and sculpture. In a less 
obvious way it has exerted another strong influence — 
as a minister to public spirit. In the mere provoca- 
tion to giving, an institution does good. In 1822 we 
find Mr. James Perkins giving the Athenaeum his 
mansion in Pearl Street, where it remained till the 
Beacon Street library was built in 1849. '^^^ purchase 
of the Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washing- 
ton in 1 83 I, and of a goodly portion of Washington's 
library, through private subscription, in 1849, definitely 
enriched the city. In 1846 came the endowment by 
John Bromfield of a perpetually increasing fund, begin- 
ning with ^75,000 for the purchase of books. In these 
days of scattered millions the amount of the gift seems 
hardly worth stopping to record. But the man of the 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 141 

first half of the century who felt the impulse to do 
something permanently useful for his city, and to do 
it not by will but during his own lifetime, was some- 
thing of a pioneer. One likes him none the less for 
the honest record that, after first planning to remain 
an unknown giver, he reflected " how almost impossible 
it was in an inquisitive and intelligent community to 
keep such a secret long and perfectly ; and, also it 
seemed to him a species of hypocrisy to pretend to 
hide what it was, in a manner, certain that time would 
ultimately and perhaps speedily reveal." 

But public spirit is shown in other ways than in 
making acknowledged gifts of money. Cotton Mather 
and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston showed it near the begin- 
ning of the earlier century in subjecting their own 
sons to the danger of inoculation. In 1802 the effi- 
cacy of vaccination, as practised by Jenner in England, 
and by his follower, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, in 
Cambridge and Boston, was still to be tested. Dr. 
Waterhouse had no fear of trying it in his own family, 
where he vaccinated four of the children and three 
servants with excellent results. It was another thing 
for laymen to offer their children to the same cause. 
Yet this is what some of the selectmen and citizens 
of good standing did with nineteen of their boys 
between eight and fifteen years of age. In the sum- 
mer of 1802 this company of boys, with an experi- 
enced nurse, went over to an old barracks on Noddle's 
island (East Boston), and having been vaccinated were 
submitted to every exposure, even sleeping in the 



142 



BOSTON 




The Athen^um, Beacon Street. 

same room with patients who had contracted small- 
pox both in the usual way and through inoculation. 
The entire success of the experiment, apart from its 
value as a striking example of public spirit, did much 
to diminish the fear and the danger of smallpox in 
Boston. 

These instances of the private sense of public re- 
sponsibility and of the effects of a pervading academic 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 143 

influence are perhaps no more typical of the place than 
a native quaHty which may draw its illustration from 
the same period of local history. This is the quality 
of caution. In the Letters from the Eastern States 
already cited an " eminent individual " tells the fol- 
lowing anecdote of himself: " Talking one day with 
his superior officer, the passionate, impetuous General 
Charles Lee, the latter exclaimed, ' Why the devil do 
you stare at me with your mouth open ; why don't 
you reply quicker ? — I say everything offhand that 

comes into my head, and by G I am ashamed of 

my own questions long before I get your answer.' 
He explained to him (slowly, however) that the habit 
was inveterate ; that he supposed it grew out of the 
situation in which the Puritans were placed ; they 
were persecuted, and obliged to be very cautious with 
answers they gave, to avoid difficulties ; and that, with 
many of their habits, had been handed down, and be- 
come a part of our education." The lineal descendants 
of those who "were persecuted, and obliged to be 
very cautious " have not yet vanished from the earth. 
The writer from whom the words are borrowed refrains 
from pointing a moral in the fate of the headlong Lee. 
He does call attention to the fact that the inexpressive 
New Englander rises to emergencies with action the 
most effective. 

The various characteristics which have been sug- 
gested are eminently those of conservatism. Because 
the Boston community was intensely conservative, the 
town stood just where it did in the political differences 



144 BOSTON 

of the young republic. It was the part of conserva- 
tism to give the right to govern the new state to those 
who had done most to create it, namely to Hancock 
and Adams. After the death of Hancock in 1793, 
Adams held the chief magistracy until 1797. One of 
his contemporaries made a good-natured remark which 
has been frequently repeated : " Samuel Adams would 
have the State of Massachusetts govern the Union, 
the town of Boston govern Massachusetts, and that he 
should govern the town of Boston, and then the whole 
would not ,be intentionally ill-governed." But even 
before his rule came to an end, the reaction against the 
" republican" principles for which he stood had begun. 
The Federalist principles which were soon to prevail 
belonged rather to a period of building up than to 
that of tearing down in which Adams's most telling 
work had been done. Perhaps nothing suggests the 
change of sentiment more clearly than the attitude of 
Boston toward the French Revolution, at its begin- 
ning and its end. The change was typical of that 
larger conservatism which gave the Federalist party its 
long preeminence in Boston. 

The first news of the uprising in Paris was hailed as 
an evidence that our good friends were following in 
the fortunate path toward that political freedom which 
America had secured. Even as late as January of 
1793 the enthusiasm found expression in an open-air 
banquet. A roasted ox weighing a thousand pounds, 
with gilded horns, raised upon a car twenty feet high, 
was drawn by fifteen horses through the town as " a 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 145 

peace offering to Liberty and Equality." The table 
spread for the feast in State Street reached from the 
Old State House to Kilby Street. From the balconies 
of the neighboring houses many women looked down 
upon the scene. In theory it was beautiful. In prac- 
tice it ended in somewhat the same manner as the 
Revolution it was celebrating ; at least portions of the 
ox are said to have been thrown into the air, and even 
the balconies became coigns of doubtful vantage. The 
laws of week-day temperance were not always so care- 
fully observed as those of Sabbath-keeping. 

All this happened two days after the execution of 
Louis XVI. In due time the news reached Boston. 
It was what the more conservative had been fearing, 
and only strengthened their belief that the people could 
not be trusted too far. This was a chief article of 
Federalist faith. The party which held it naturally 
came to be known as the "English" as opposed to 
the "French" party, — the anti-Federalists, called 
first Republicans, then, and in later incarnations, 
Democrats. 

The sources of strength for the Federalist party in 
Boston were obvious. They have been well enumer- 
ated as " the clergy, shocked at the increasing infidelity 
in France, capitalists alarmed at the disregard of the 
rights of property, merchants interested to conciliate 
England as the mistress of the seas, and loyalists, still 
cherishing a filial love for the land of their fathers." 
It may fairly be questioned whether this final class 
exerted any strong influence. Regarding the others 



T46 BOSTON 

there can be no doubt. Numerically surpassed per- 
haps by those who greeted the French Revolution with 
the warmest sympathy, they were the classes which 
clearly saw their interest in stability of every sort; and 
since their interest was in large measure that of the 
community, their political views could hardly have 
failed to gain and hold important ground. The gov- 
ernorship of the state may fairly be taken to repre- 
sent the prevailing sentiment. Immediately following 
the fifteen Republican terms of Hancock and Adams, 
the supremacy was divided in the ratio of twenty- 
one Federalist terms of office against eight for their 
opponents. 

In spite of this unequal division of power there was 
a rivalry between the two parties so keen and constant 
as to breed the bitterest political feeling. We read of 
two intimate friends belonging to the opposite parties 
quarrelling so violently over the election of the Re- 
publican candidate, James Sullivan, to the governor- 
ship in 1807, that their intercourse ceased entirely for 
forty years, when the Federalist lay dying, and his old 
Republican friend and enemy travelled from far to 
bid him a peaceful farewell. The Embargo of 1807 
and the approach of the War of 1812 only intensified 
the divisions. In 181 1 a Boston lady wrote to her 
brother in England : " The anniversary of American 
Independence has been lately celebrated with great 
splendor by both parties, for unhappily we are much 
divided, long processions and military escorts display- 
ing the extent of both." Another Boston lady wrote 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 147 

to her Federalist husband in Washington two months 
before war was declared in 18 12: "Both the clergy- 
men I heard yesterday preached very orthodox doc- 
trine, according to your opinion. Mr. Channing's 
subject was the baneful effect of party spirit. In the 
treatment of it, he gave much offence to some high- 
toned partisans." With politics affecting both the 
pulpit and the Fourth of July celebration, there were 
sure to be results in private life even more tragic than 
the estrangement of friends. 

The private tragedy of the Federalist period in Bos- 
ton was the killing in 1806 of the son of a distinguished 
Republican lawyer, Benjamin Austin, by Thomas O. 
Selfridge, a Federalist lawyer of professional and social 
prominence. The two men had quarrelled over a 
matter so trivial that only politics could account for 
the bitterness aroused. Selfridge called Austin in 
print " a coward, liar and scoundrel." Austin's son, 
Charles, just about to graduate creditably at Harvard, 
took it upon himself one day to avenge the insult. 
He attacked Selfridge on the sidewalk in State Street 
at the hour of the day when his deed would be most 
open. Selfridge drew a pistol, and fired the bullet 
from the effects of which young Austin immediately 
died in a shop near by. In the trial which soon 
followed, political feeling naturally played a prominent 
part. Republican lawyers, of whom Attorney-General 
Sullivan was one, argued against Selfridge, who was 
defended by Harrison Gray Otis and others from the 
front ranks of Federalism. Selfridge was convicted 



148 BOSTON 

merely of manslaughter. On the charge of murder he 
was judged " Not guilty." Whatever the eloquence 
of the lawyers, or the sympathies of the jurors, the ver- 
dict and the true merits of the case seem to have stood 
together. 

There was another occasion, a few years earlier, 
when politics were pleasantlv forgotten for a moment. 
Caleb Strong, Federalist candidate for governor, was 
elected in 1800. On a day soon after this event a pub- 
lic procession of which he was a part marched through 
Winter Street, past the house of Samuel Adams, the 
venerable leader of the defeated party. At Mr. 
Strong's order the procession halted. With bared 
head he stepped aside from it, and shook the hand of 
the ancient champion of popular liberty. It is note- 
worthy that in this our last glimpse of Samuel Adams, 
who died three years later, his political opponents are 
seen doing him reverence. 

The year after the death of Samuel Adams, Alexan- 
der Hamilton fell in his duel with Aaron Burr. In 
other parts of the country Federalism did not long 
survive this loss. But in Boston, as we have seen, 
there were causes deeper than adherence to any indi- 
viduals for constancy to Federalist principles ; and 
soon the fruits of Jefferson's Embargo of 1807 
ripened into effects which held the community in 
opposition to Republicanism. In passing the Embargo 
Act the authorities were less concerned with the inter- 
ests of New England than with the hope of injuring 
England. An act which crippled the commerce of all 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 149 

the states, wrought of course its greatest hardships 
in Massachusetts, where, before the passage of the 
Embargo, about one-third of all the shipping in the 
country was owned. When the Act became a law this 
shipping must needs rot at the wharves. Owners and 
sailors were alike the sufferers. One January day a 
crowd of from eighty to a hundred seamen marched 
with a half-masted flag to Governor Sullivan's house, 
and made their plea for either work or bread. A tact- 
ful speech from the Governor chanced to send them 
away good-natured. Both in Boston and in other 
New England seaports public soup-kitchens were 
opened for the many who needed them. But none 
of these were things to breed content. Indeed, there 
were even whispers of secession in the air. Between 
the repeal of the Embargo in 1808, and Madison's 
declaration of war with England in 18 12, little or 
nothing was done to render New England any better 
satisfied with the course of national affairs. In the 
nature of things war could not be popular in Boston, 
nor could the national government be expected to do 
much for the place which had so bitterly opposed it. 
Commodore Bainbridge, commanding the Charlestown 
Navy Yard, had to deal with a committee of civilians 
demanding the removal of the Constitution and the 
newly launched Independence to a point in the harbor 
below the fort, where a possible attack from British 
ships would not bring destruction upon the town. 
He gave them his frank opinion of citizens who 
would let their disapproval of an administration so 



I50 BOSTON 

blind them to the interests of the nation at large, 
and kept the ships where they were. Of their own 
motion the people of Boston put their old forts in 
order, and built a new one. Fort Strong, on Noddle's 
Island. Before the war was ended, Boston was 
represented at the Hartford Convention by a little 
group of its leading men who lent their voices to 
such expressions of states'-rights as fifty years later 
their grandsons counted treason. Fortunately the 
end of the war removed many of the causes of Fed- 
eralist complaint, and in the "era of good feeling" 
which immediately followed, political animosities faded 
away. 

Even with its commerce paralyzed, Boston was not 
permitted to forget its importance as a seaport. Ships 
of war and privateers came and went as they could. 
The Constitution^ launched in 1797 from the shipyard 
where " Constitution Wharf" now stands, was, as we 
are soon to see, peculiarly a Boston vessel. Into 
Boston harbor Commodore Hull sailed her after his 
escape from the British squadron in the summer of 
I 8 12. To Boston again she came after the Guerriere 
fight a few weeks later ; and when she returned again 
under Bain bridge, the Java had struck to her, off the 
Brazilian coast. Over this victory there were public 
rejoicings worthy of a town in closer sympathy with 
the war. Still later — on June i, 1813 — the hills and 
housetops of Boston were crowded with people watch- 
ing the Chesapeake as she sailed down the harbor and 
joined in that disastrous conflict with the Shannon^ of 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 



151 



which the distant smoke and sounds were not beyond 
sight and hearing. 

To the very crippling of the merchant marine, how- 
ever, Boston owed a new phase of its development — 
the rapid growth of manufactures in the first and second 
decades of the century. The capital and energy which 










Mj^^i^" 








Removing Beacon Hill. 
After a Drawing made in 1811, by J. R. Smith. 

commerce had engaged could not lie inactive, and here 
was their natural outlet. It was a fortunate circum- 
stance also that in 1803 the Middlesex Canal, begun 
in 1794, was opened for traffic. Thus the merchandise 
of Boston and the products of the valley of the 
Merrimac, with which the canal joined itself at East 
Chelmsford, now Lowell, could be freely exchanged. 
Twenty-seven miles in length, navigated in twelve 



152 BOSTON 

hours by boats of twenty-four tons, the canal, a triumph 
of its day, dwindles to small proportions in the per- 
spective of a century. There is even a pathos in the 
trick by which fame has given permanence to the name 
of the engineer, Loammi Baldwin, who built the for- 
gotten waterway. It is not for this service that he is 
remembered, but because while making his survey for 
the canal, he or one of his associates chanced by the 
edge of a wood upon an old tree, much damaged by 
wood-peckers, but bearing a few bright red apples. 
They were tasted, and the flavor was so agreeable that 
scions were cut, and from these the whole succeeding 
race of Baldwin apples has sprung. 

In all these years of transition from town to city, 
Boston had been growing rapidly. The bridges to 
Charlestown and Cambridge, opened respectively in 
1786 and 1793, had the virtual effect of widening the 
town boundaries. With the nineteenth century be- 
gan the changes in the outline of ancient Boston which 
left it a peninsula no longer. In 181 1 one of the Bos- 
ton ladies already quoted wrote, " Old Beacon hill is 
taking down to fill up the mill pond," and, with due 
horror at the removal of the everlasting hill to which 
her eyes had looked up, she complained that the 
Hancock heirs in selling their land for such a purpose 
" have preferred interest to elegance, not a very new 
thing." It was in this change that Bulfinch's Beacon 
monument, recently restored in part to the State House 
grounds, was displaced from its commanding position 
on the site of the old beacon, higher than the State 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 153 

House Itself. A more important aspect of the change 
— which took twenty-five years for its full accomplish- 
ment — was that the fiUing in of the Mill Pond added 
about seventy acres to the north end of the town. The 
traveller arriving at the North Station does not realize 
that he may be alighting on portions of Beacon, Copp's 
and Pemberton hills ; but from one or all of these 
eminences came the land on which the station stands. 

On the opposite side of the town, meanwhile, growth 
of a less artificial sort had been going forward. A land 
speculation on Dorchester Neck (now South Boston) 
was behind the movement resulting in a bill of the 
General Court which in 1804 took this territory away 
from the reluctant Dorchester and added it to Boston. 
The expected influx of population did not follow the 
opening of the first South Boston bridge at Dover 
Street in 1805. All efforts to build a second bridge 
were fruitless for twenty years. At one period in the 
quarrel between the rival factions, a boisterous crowd 
disguised as Indians — unworthy children perhaps of 
the Tea Party " Mohawks " — floated away the struc- 
ture over which communication had actually been es- 
tablished. It was not till after Boston became a city 
that the second bridge was finally built, and the growth 
of South Boston began. 

Even more rapid than the territorial growth through 
these years of transition was the Increase of population. 
In round numbers the decennial gains were from 
18,000 in 1790 to 24,000 in 1800, to 33,000 In 18 10, 
to 43,000 in 1820. Long before this highest figure 



154 



BOSTON 



was reached it became clear that the old and jealously 
guarded form of government by town-meetings was 
impracticable. The unwieldy number of voters, the 
waste and failure of power at many points of making 
and administering the local laws, a score of considera- 




HousE OF John Phillips, Birthplace of Wendell Phillips; 
Corner of Beacon and Walnut streets. 

tions, made some change imperative. Yet it was not 
an easy thing to bring about. As early as 1784-5 
a plan to effect the change was presented. Again in 
1 79 1, in 1804, in 1815, the matter was discussed, — 
not always in the light of a forthright adoption of city 
government. One of these compromise plans pro- 



FROM TOWN TO CITY 155 

posed incorporation under tlie hybrid title of " the 
Intendant and Municipahty of the Town and City of 
Boston." It was in 1822 that an organization of mayor, 
aldermen, and council was adopted — not without a 
struggle. To choose a first mayor was almost as diffi- 
cult. Harrison Gray Otis and Josiah Quincy, Fed- 
eralists both, were the leading candidates, and received 
so nearly the same number of votes that both with- 
drew. Thereupon John Phillips was readily elected 
for a single term. 

The names of these three candidates mean much or 
little, according to one's knowledge of local conditions. 
If those with the fuller knowledge require further evi- 
dence that the real leaders of the place, not in politics 
alone, were the men who sought political office, a list 
of the aldermen and council for the early years of 
city government will present a surprising abundance 
of names then and still associated with the best inter- 
ests of Boston life. The new city wisely carried on 
the traditions of the ancient town. Or shall we say 
that the influence of the town-meeting in keeping the 
true leaders at the head of local affairs was too strong 
to be overcome except by slow degrees ? 



VI 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 




K 



EEPING the theme of Place 
and People steadily in view, 
we have not yet let the inhabitants 
of Boston lead us far awav from her 
three hills. But Emerson was more 
than a maker of pleasant phrases 
when he wrote of his birthplace : — 

*• Each street leads downward to the sea 
Or landward to the west." 

Down these streets, then, and out into the widest 
world, some of the people must surely be followed, if 
the place is truly to be understood. No apology is 
needed — now or later — for departing for a time from 
the strict sequence of events to look separately at special 
phases of the life which has made both place and peo- 
ple precisely what they have been. Perhaps the fore- 
most of these phases is that in which the central figures 
are the men who, in their successive generations, have 
gone out to the ends of the earth, carrying the local 
spirit abroad, and enriching the native town and city 
by all they have brought back. 

Followers of the sea more than the people of any 
other place in America before the Revolution, the men 
of Boston could not but return, in the general restoring 

156 




Earliest Chart of Boston Harbor, 1688-9. 
In possession of Boston Public Library. 



15 = 



BOSTON 



of normal conditions, to their interest in maritime 
affairs. How could it be otherwise? At their very 
feet lay the inviting bay, with its best of harbors, safe 
from the sea of which it is less an arm than a shoulder. 
At their very doors lay all the materials for ship-build- 
ing. How entirely the Constitution^ finished in 1797, 
' was a home-made vessel, and therein a typical product, 
Mr. H. A. Hill has pointed out in his monograph on 
Boston commerce : " Paul Revere furnished the copper, 
bolts and spikes, drawn from malleable copper by a 
process then new ; and Ephraim Thayer, who had a 
shop at the South End, made the gun-carriages for 
the frigate. Her sails were made in the Granary 
building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets ; 
no other building in Boston was large enough for the 
purpose. There were then fourteen rope-walks in 
Boston, so that there could be no difficulty in obtain- 
ing cordage; and there was an incorporated company 
for the manufacture of sail-cloth, whose factory was on 
the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets, and which 
was encouraged by a bounty on its product from the 
General Court ; this product had increased to eighty 
or ninety thousand yards per annum, and is said to 
have competed successfully with the duck brought 
from abroad. The anchors came from Hanover in 
Plymouth county, and a portion of the timber used 
in what was then looked upon as a mammoth vessel 
was taken from the woods of Allentown, on the 
borders of the Merrimac, fifty miles away." Surely 
the provocation to seafaring was sufficiently strong. 







HULL'S VICTORY, 



OR, aVZZA FOKTm 



CONSTITUTION. 



* > UUP soue of" fr««lam, eK-i' ear to my Pong. 


Tllat 'lit 


a«bret.(o j-;»e o'.jr »liit limy thoaghl a !!.«*• jt.lj 


VVhiii. ihf f\raKeof1>mTf ilOf/L I atr<'mp[ to pfolooe. 


With 


ur |«io ooL-e Caplaiu, we'll fi^bt oil thfuwin,. 


' - fich tioltl heartpd hero no-v HH np hu gfaaa, 


Aad w 


bopa thai wits bint, we'll so^u cOQciuor ogaju. 


' 1 ottx fjTorit* sfuiiMRcnt /a|iU]t^ pjifia. 






AVi' h oftr brav^'noWw taptaio, we'U stitJ plow flic 


Tne BrH 


jna bad ^e:*SwD.acf*re,s«n (he tijie. 


VVg-ll 6gl>i and "c'll c<jaj)iMirj^^gsin amts^a'ra. 


For we . 


ak*d 'cfn at? clean, tbev'dno coLouts to 5(rike ; . 


So a son 


oo flieir fcvjitt)- we.5 forc'd lo lit By, 




To toforr 


n 01 Ihiyilitla t ifuilc all wish to dif. 


.V*li a &BC sprlnfiin^ br'-^-z?, our sails tkey wcfC bent, 


■r.as 


bus unb ourxi|Jt«in «<• fonstil on lb«. Bain, 


Ao.l «iih hearts f«li of joy to llt« oceau i»e »eot. 


And w 


e're ri-adj- biaie 'jovs, lo %!" lUhlilai again. 


in tkcfa,Ti-.t Coajlitoilon a laiigHt aud slaoDCb boat, 






Amkt i>ai wea on the xslcr jlloat. 


In isent 


-live minotfB, ihc bu'jnt^'; wa* djoc, 


Wilft onr biaveuaWcCal^talu, we pfow'd tKe deep malo, 


For Ihtj 


didn't qiulc tflish such Irno Vnolee foo ; 


Aod w-hru kc conunaxtda, wc arc T-.&tiy agaio. 


Sowc kl 


odly rt^cctr'd 'tnti on tjoaril o>tr good ship. 



f1 



oh the twentiptb of Augns*, a nail we espied, 
'\\ e bore too, and $000 we catu« up along tifle ; 
Thr drom brat to ouartcVs, to quarters w/* riui, 
'iodiachtir bijV»tf»wori! toilandfiWl If bis Jon. 
On Cafilain 30 linnc, ss we joil'd oa the mam. 
Now bids OJ a buicst of jlory to gain' 



Many curbing the dav Jebcn flx-y took their last trip. 
Wilh our brate 0<il?l" captain tu'll Btill plow ibe ayrlB. 
We'll lijht and we'll conquer ajsio and again. 



; boQDd. with a fal 



[ing bt. 



A brr)adtu!e the fup qnick 
We retora'd-'em ' ' 
Kacb heart was i 



' poe 



r direct on the wotd, 
► bosom koej* fear, 
And «c cax'd not a ,oap for the saner Gnewk-rc. 

With onr noblo ciwimandet we foeght on the male, 
- And we'll conquer wiffiliiaj wben be bids 05 again. 

The ballj now £t» thick, vitl quite warm was tjhv plaj, 
Their a>a«ts and ttreir riv^ging was 30on shot away, 
We thaltet'd their boll • ith all po»«lble speetl, 
M'.ib our good spoiiky boll-do^s, of ttw Yaokee br«d» 
yrwas thus with oar capia'n wc fvufbt on tbc main, ' 
^ AVitli luO) a flab h&rseil of glorr to gain. 

W^/Tie Wood from lb? etieirjH scnppera ma faflt, 
All hopes of >ul>duiug yi now were ^oiie ga-t : 
"oAbej wisely ct,ucliitltil, ^y huh or by /lobj 



Now hoiacward ' 

Ai lull of good bnnior and orirlh as yoo pic: 
T'ach tfuc-bea'rtrd saiku partakes of the ^liss. 
And drinks oita bcB'ftl to his farorite lass, 

With oorbiavcoofifeciptaiu we're plow'rt tk«3«pii 

Wiik bim we the lawrelKof glM^tfid g»iB. ^ 

NjSs' snrccas to the good CoastitulIt?»,-a Ijoat 
Whlrh ber drew will defend, whjie a plank is aOoal, 
Who oercr will (Uncb, or'in ijnly e'er la*;, 
Bat will 8'iek to ibe Usl br tbc Anicric«i Sag. 

So tcoe 10 oar colors we'll e«or rcmaiii, 
-. And we'll conquer for freedom agaia and a^aio. 

\V*l«li a^lin we shall j)low old Neptune's bloe ware. 

May bonora still rlrcle the brows of the brare. 

And tbooW .mr bold foes witl^lo givj- tU a poll 

We'll show 'cm the jt»d Conslitolioo and Hvil,. ' 

And now tiiib three cheers e'e wc sail to the toalo,, _ ?j 

Wo will greet OUT Wirt Caittaln "iM» "^ *^''%^^''----^ 



Broadside in possession of Benj.mvun F. Stevens, Est.). 



i6o BOSTON 

All this was in the Revolutionary century. With 
the coming of peace it might have been expected that 
the doors of commerce would be thrown immediately 
open. Yet it would have been hardly human for the 
mother country to smooth any paths for the child that 
had cast off all parental authority. The British West 
India trade was of course subject to English legislation. 
It was not long before the merchants of Boston, as of 
all our ports, found themselves forbidden to bring their 
fish to the islands or to carry the island products to 
England. These products if brought first to New 
England could not even be carried to England in 
British ships. This prohibition was followed in 1784 
by that of exporting anything from the West Indies to 
the United States except in British vessels. Here the 
citizens of Boston asserted themselves, and entered as 
of old into agreements to buy none of the wares so 
imported. The Massachusetts legislature passed meas- 
ures of retaliation ; and the national laws of navigation 
and commerce reflected for some years the British 
policy of restriction. If success is determined by 
obstacles, the commercial enterprise of Boston could 
not have had a more favorable beginning. 

Not content with the difficulties nearest home, the 
merchants of America, in the earliest days of peace, 
began turning their eyes to the distant trade of China. 
To New York belongs the credit of sending out the 
first vessel in this trade, the Empress of the Seas, which 
set sail for Canton in February of 1784, and was back 
in New York in May of the next year. Her super- 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 163 

cargo was a Boston youth of twenty, Samuel Shaw by 
name, whose service on General Knox's staff in the 
Revolution had already won him the rank of major. 
In his journal of the outward voyage he tells of land- 
ing at St. Jago, an island of the Cape de Verde group. 
The officer of the port was a Portuguese. " On telling 
him," says Shaw, " by the interpreter, a negro, that 
we were Americans, he discovered great satisfaction, 
and exclaimed with an air of pleasure and surprise, 
' Bostonian ! Bostonian ! ' " With this — and the 
Boston supercargo — to remember, the New England 
town may comfortably orient herself with the first of 
the Chinese traders. 

It was not long, however, before the town could 
claim as her own a commercial venture of the first 
importance and magnitude. The journals of Captain 
Cook "the navigator" were published in 1784. 
Through them the great possibilities of the fur trade 
on the northwest coast of America were made known. 
Five Boston merchants, including the Bulfinch whose 
architecture still dominates the local landscape, and 
one merchant of New York, joined themselves to enter 
this new field. The vessels they secured for the expe- 
dition were two ; the Columbia^ a full-rigged ship of 
two hundred and twelve tons, eighty-three feet in 
length, and the Washington^ a sloop of ninety tons. 
Let those who dread six days of the Atlantic on 
liners of fifteen thousand tons' burden, stop a moment 
and picture these cockle-shells — as they must appear 
to-day — and the spirit of the men who embarked in 



164 BOSTON 

them for the north Pacific and — in the Columbia — 
for the complete circling of the globe. Before they 
set sail, September 30, 1787, they provided themselves 
plentifully with silver, bronze, and pewter medals com- 
memorating the expedition, and with useful tools and 
useless trinkets, — jews-harps, snuff-boxes, and the like. 
Rounding the Horn, and sailing northward, it was the 
httle Washington which first reached the northwest 
coast. While waiting for the Columbia^ the sloop's 
crew had an encounter with natives, who gave them 
good reason to call their anchorage " Murderers' 

Harbor." Then the 
^ y ^ / — -^ Columbia came, with 

/i,Cr/>C/i^ ^^^4j€>cy scurvy on board. 
^ /y But the cargo of furs 

^ was secured, and, in 

pursuance of the owners' plan, was carried to Canton 
for sale. Stopping on the way at Hawaii, Captain 
Gray took on board the Columbia a young chief, Attoo, 
promising to send him back from Boston so soon as 
might be. From China the ship loaded with teas 
sailed for home by way of the Cape of Good Hope. 
In August of 1790 she dropped anchor in Boston 
harbor, the first American vessel to circumnavigate the 
earth. There were salutes from the castle and the 
town artillery, formal greetings by the collector of 
the port and Governor Hancock. Beside Captain 
Gray young Attoo marched up State Street, wearing 
" a helmet of gay feathers, which glittered in the sun- 
light, and an exquisite cloak of the same yellow and 




ffi Z M 



5 O -s 






THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 167 

scarlet plumage." Never before had the ends of the 
earth and the "happy town beside the sea" been 
brought so near together. 

In spite of the fact that this unprecedented voyage 
of the Columbia was not a financial success, four of her 
six owners proved their faith in the undertaking by 
sending her directly back to the northwest coast. 
This second voyage, on which she sailed September 
28, 1790, was destined to write the good ship's name 
on the map of the country. It was nearly two years 
later when, having taken Attoo back to Hawaii in the 
humble capacity of cabin-boy, and having spent a 
winter on the coast. Captain Gray, cruising to the 
southward, saw what he took to be the mouth of a 
mighty river. There were breakers to warn him 
against entering it. To this forbidding aspect of 
things we may owe the entry in Vancouver's journal 
at the same point : " Not considering this opening 
worthy of attention, I continued our pursuit to the 
northwest." For Captain Gray the breakers were an 
obstacle only to be overcome. After several efforts 
he drove the ship through them, and found himself in 
a noble stream of fresh water. Up this river he sailed 
some twenty-four miles and having assured himself 
that he might continue farther if he chose, returned to 
the sea. The headlands at the mouth of the river he 
named, like a true son of Boston, Cape Hancock and 
Point Adams, He raised the American flag, buried 
some coins of his young country, and named the 
river after his vessel, the Columbia. Upon this dis- 



i68 BOSTON 

covery and the explorations of Lewis and Clark in the 
next decade, the American government based its suc- 
cessful claim to the Oregon country. Yet for the 
Boston merchants whose enterprise wrought such 
momentous results, the second voyage, like the first, 
was but a small success. In spite of the abundant 
salutes and cheers which greeted the Columbia when 
she sailed into Boston harbor in July of 1793, the 
ship and her inventory were sold at once by auction at 
a Charlestown wharf. It was hers, however, to open 
the way to an important commerce. In the years 
immediately following, a lucrative trade, largely in the 
hands of Boston merchants, was carried on in direct 
pursuance of the Columbia s example, even in the 
matter of circumnavigation, with stops at the Sandwich 
Islands and China. 

The slender tonnage of such vessels as the Columbia 
and the Washington allies them closely with the infancy 
of commerce. From the extreme youthfulness of 
many of the shipmasters and supercargoes of Boston 
ships sailing to distant seas, the reader of later years 
draws the same impression of besjinnings. Mere boys 
found themselves filling posts of responsibility which 
could not but bring the man in them to the quickest 
possible development. Edward Everett, in his sketch of 
the chief marine underwriter of the early days of Boston 
commerce, has given us this bit of record : " The writer 
of this memoir knows an instance which occurred at 
the beginning of this century, — and the individual 
concerned, a wealthy and respected banker of Boston, 




A e. 



A *- 



w 


— ■ 


K 


60 


H 


c 


"/: 


■^ 

ri 


o 


i-< 


(!< 


Q 


D 








W 










M 


(i. 


"n 


o 


o 


H 


g 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 171 

is still living among us, — in which a youth of nineteen 
commanded a ship on her voyage from Calcutta to 
Boston, with nothing in the shape of a chart on board 
but the small map of the world in Guthrie's Geogra- 
phy." In the service of the Messrs. Perkins, John P. 
Gushing went out to China, at the age of sixteen, in 
1 803, as clerk to the agent of the firm's business, a man 
but little older than himself. This superior in office 
soon died, leaving to young Cushing's care the conduct 
of large sales and purchases, which he managed so well 
as promptly to win himself a place in the important 
firm. Captain Robert Bennet Forbes — another nephew 
of the Messrs. Perkins, and a typical merchant of the 
somewhat later time in which he flourished — gives 
this summary of his early career : " At the age of 
sixteen I filled a man's place as third mate ; at the age 
of twenty I was promoted to a command ; at the age of 
twenty-six I commanded my own ship ; at twenty- 
eight I abandoned the sea as a profession ; at thirty- 
six I was at the head of the largest American house in 
China." This was the boy who at thirteen began his 
nautical life " with a capital consisting of a Testament, 
a ' Bowditch,' a quadrant, a chest of sea-clothes, and a 
mother's blessing." To this equipment should be 
added the advice of another uncle. Captain William 
Sturgis : "Always go straight forward, and if you 
meet the devil cut him in two, and go between the 
pieces ; if any one imposes on you, tell him to whistle 
against the northwester and to bottle up moonshine." 
It was a rough, effective training to which boys Hke 



172 



BOSTON 



young Bennet Forbes were put. If in instances like 
bis own, family influence had its weight, — for bis 
kinsmen, the Perkinses, Sturgises, Russells, and others, 
were long in virtual control of the China trade, — yet 
the youths to whom opportunity came were equal to 
it. We are used to bearing our own age called that of 
the young man. These Boston boys, and Farragut 
in command of a prize at twelve, spare us the burden 
of providing precedents for the future. 

Over against these triumphs of youth may well be 
set another picture — taken from the memoir by 
Edward Everett already drawn upon. He writes of 
Thomas Russell, who died in 1796, the pioneer 
of the Russian trade, the foremost merchant of his 
time : " According to the fashion of the day, he 
generally appeared on 'Change in full dress ; which 
implied at that time, for elderly persons, usually a 
coat of some light-colored cloth, small clothes, diamond 
or paste buckles at the knee and in the shoes, silk 
stockings, powdered hair, and a cocked hat ; in cold 
weather, a scarlet cloak. A scarlet cloak and a white 
head were, in the last century, to be seen at the end 
of every pew in some of the Boston churches." Thus 
between land and sea, youth and age, the balance of 
picturesqueness is fairly struck ; and withal there is a 
suggestion of old world dignity without which any 
impression of the early Boston merchants would be 
incomplete. 

It is not to one of these dignified gentlemen that 
one looks for such projects as Lord Timothy Dexter's 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 



173 



proverbial shipping of warm- 
ing pans to the tropics. 
Yet it was a Boston mer- 
chant, Erederic Tudor, who 
began to carry the pecul- 
iarly northern commodity 
of ice to the West Indies. 
Even at the centre of 
"Yankee notions" he was . 
regarded as a person of ' 
unbridled fancy. Indeed, 
the story of this traffic in 
ice is one of the strangest 
episodes of Boston com- 
merce. As related chiefly 
in an old number of Scrib- 
ner s Monthly^ it is that in 
1805 a plague of yellow 

fever wrought havoc in the Bust by H. Dexter. In possession of the 
West India Islands: Mr. Massachusetts Historical society. 

Tudor saw how grievously ice was needed, and de- 
termined to supply it. Cutting two or three hun- 
dred tons from a pond at Saugus, he had it hauled to 
Charlestown, and loaded the brig Favorite for Marti- 
nique. This, in his own words, " excited the derision 
of the whole town as a mad project." Ridicule and 
opposition, however, were the surest means of fixing 
his purpose. Though at first without financial suc- 
cess, he proved that ice could be carried to a warm 
climate. Then the British government saw what 




Frederic Tudor. 



PAR PRIVILEGE DU COUVERNEMENT. 





.ujounD'Hui 7 mars et pendant trois jours 
consecutifs, il sera depose en vcnte par 
petites quantkes line cargaison de Glace , 
tres-bien conservee apportee en ce port , 
de Boston, parle brick jF(3yon7^, capitaine 
Pearson ; cette vente se fera abord, et ne 
durera que ces trois jours seulement , le 
brick devant se rendre a cette epoque 
dans une autre ile. 

MM. les habitans de St-Pierre. trouve- 
ront ici Toccasion de demontrer ( en con- 
courant a en, faire Tacquisition ) que cet 
article pent devenir un objet d'importa- 
tion reguliere dans la Colonie. 

Le prix est de 3o sous la livre. 

N. B. II est ncccssaire de faire apporter avec sol une 
ttoffe de laine , ou un morceau de couvcrture pour enve. 
loppcr la glace ; ce moyen la fait conserver plus longtems. 

Saiut-ficrjc Martinique, cliez J.-B. TIIOLIS'ENS, Pine ti Fits, 
Imprimcurs. da Gouverucnicnt. 



Advertisement of Ice offered for Sale in Martinique, 1806. 
From F. Tudor's Journal, in possession of F. Tudor, Esq. 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 175 

cooling benefits might thus be brought to its West 
Indian subjects. Accordingly, Mr. Tudor secured 
the monopoly, with further special advantages, for the 
sale of ice in Jamaica. At Kingston he built his ice- 

'4u -^ ^;-^ ^-^ '^^^ f^ 

Motto from F. Tudor's Journal. 

houses. Havana and other Cuban ports were opened 
to him on similar terms. By degrees he built up also a 
large traffic with our own southern cities, — Charleston, 
Savannah, and New Orleans. Then followed, in 
1833, — '^^ t^^ request of English and American mer- 
chants in Calcutta, — the "ice-king's" invasion of the 
Far East. From small beginnings the ice trade with 
Calcutta grew to proportions which made it long an 
important element in holding for Boston the suprem- 
acy in all the commerce between Calcutta and the 
United States. Rio Janeiro must be added to the 
list of tropical cities to which the Tudor ships carried 
their cargoes of ice. The bald recital of the facts in 
the story of this merchant's success is sufficient to stir 
the imagination. To do such things with the tools at 
hand — sailing vessels and none of the modern imple- 



176 BOSTON 

nients of labor-saving — called for a species of ability 
in which imagination itself must have played no trifling 
part. 

It may be that this quality of imagination was lack- 
ing in the Boston and Salem merchants who attempted 
in 1842 to introduce American Ice Into London. One 
of them tried to attain this end by demonstrating the 
merits of iced American drinks. He hired a hall, 
as the story goes, and trained a number of men to 
mix the cool beverages of his native land. The 
members of the Fishmonger's Association — presum- 
ably as fond of turtle as aldermen themselves — were 
the guests. The waiters made an imposing entry — 
but alas ! the first sound that met the ear of the 
American " promoter," expecting a chorus of approval, 
was that of an English voice calling for hot water, and 
saying, " 1 prefer It 'alf 'n 'alf." The American com- 
pletes the story, " I made a dead rush for the door, 
next day settled my bills in London, took train for 
Liverpool and the steamer for Boston, and counted 
up a clear loss of |i200." 

The counting of losses has doubtless had its con- 
stant place in the calculations of merchants. To the 
commoner counting of profits on Boston wharves may 
be ascribed the practice, very general a hundred years 
ago and less, among persons of every sort and condi- 
tion, of sending out "adventures." The sea was the 
Wall Street of the time, and the time was that when 
even the uncertainties of the lottery were in good 
repute. It is in no way surprising, then, to find in 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 177 

a newspaper of 1788, in the advertisement of two ships 
about to sail for the Isle of France and India, this 
announcement : " Any person desiring to adventure 
to that part of the world may have an opportunity 
of sending goods on freight." In executing these 
commissions, the supercargo became, besides the 
owners' agent, almost a public servant. Professional 
men, women, boys, all classes of the community, took 
this inviting road to profit. At the age of eight (1821) 
John Murray Forbes wrote in a letter, " My adventure 
sells very well in the village." A foot-note to the pas- 
sage in Mr. Forbes's Life explains that the boy was in 
the habit of importing in the Perkins vessels, with the 
help of older relatives, little adventures in tea, silk, or 
possibly Chinese toys. Thus by the time he sailed to 
China himself, at seventeen, he had accumulated more 
than a thousand dollars of his own. 

That there were heavy risks to be run both by 
owners and by private speculators, the high rates of 
insurance, and the fortunes built up by marine under- 
writers, clearly testify. The difficult navigation laws 
of England and France during the Napoleonic wars 
provided an important element in these risks. Our 
own Embargo and War of 18 12 brought dangers 
amounting to prohibitions, with effects upon Boston 
commerce which have been touched upon in the pre- 
ceding chapter. Among the first vessels to arrive in 
Boston after the restoration of peace were the New 
Hazard and the Catch-me-if-you-can, whose very names 
bespoke the anxiety of the commercial class. With 



lyS BOSTON 

the confidence which came with peace, new opportunities 
were so firmly grasped that fiDr forty years the com- 
merce of Boston continued to spread to every near 
and distant port of the world. So early as 1791 there 
is the record of seventy sail leaving Boston harbor in 
a single day. Yet in 1846 one may read of a hundred 
and twenty-nine arrivals in the same brief period. That 
one great risk, of the earlier time — the risk of piracy 
— should have extended so far as it did into the later, 
we of these more shielded days cannot easily realize. 
There is nothing of anachronism in the story of the 
Atahual-pa^ sailing for Canton in 1808, commanded by 
Captain William Sturgis, carrying more than three 
hundred thousand Spanish milled dollars, and winning a 
desperate battle with Chinese pirates at the mouth of 
Canton River. The ship had previously been in the 
Indian trade on the northwest coast, and had then been 
pierced for musketry and armed with four six-pound 
cannon. To these, which Captain Sturgis had carried 
with him to China, contrary to the orders of Theodore 
Lyman, the chief owner of the vessel, the defeat of 
the pirates was largely due. It savors of the stern 
and strenuous time, however, to find it reported — 
whether credibly or not — that on reaching Boston 
Sturgis was obliged to pay freight on the cannons. 
" Obey orders if you break owners," was a motto not 
to be treated lightly. 

Less remote in time and place than these Chinese 
pirates stand the twelve Spaniards brought to Boston 
and tried on the charge that " piratically, feloniously, 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 179 

violently, and against the will " of the captain of the brig 
Mexican y which sailed from Salem in August, 1832, for 
Rio, they " did steal, rob, take, and carry away " the 
|20,ooo in specie with which a homeward cargo was to 
have been purchased. This the pirates of the schooner 
Panda, sailing the Spanish Main, undoubtedly did. A 
copy of the Salem Gazette, containing an account of the 
affair, somehow fell into the hands of Captain Trotter, 
commanding H.B.M. brig Curlew on the African 
coast. A vessel lying in the river Nazareth, and 
answering the description of the Panda, excited Captain 
Trotter's suspicions. With considerable difficulty he 
captured her and her crew, whom he brought to Salem. 
The trial in Boston occupied two weeks. William C. 
Codman, then a schoolboy, has recalled the excitement 
it produced: "Every morning the 'Black Maria' 
brought the prisoners from the Leverett Street Jail to 
the court room. The wooden fence around the Com- 
mon was perched upon in every possible place from 
which a view of the pirates could be obtained. The 
streets and malls were so filled with eager spectators 
that the police had great difficulty in keeping the crowd 
back." The captain, mate, and five of the crew were 
found guilty. President Andrew Jackson reprieved the 
first officer on the ground of a previous act of humanity 
to American citizens. The other pirates were executed 
in Boston, June 11, 1835. It is this date, so little 
beyond remembrance of many men now living, which 
brings the " old, unhappy, far-off things " of peril by 
sea well into what seems our own time. 



i8o BOSTON 

To guard against the risks which foresight could 
avert, it was the custom of ship-owners to give their 
captains, on setting sail, letters of instructions as minute 
in particulars as the orders of a military or naval com- 
mander to a subordinate setting forth on a difficult 
expedition. Many things which might now be said 
by cable or rapid mails were then thought out and 
committed in advance to paper; and nothing that the 
old merchants have left behind them speaks more 
clearly for their breadth of vision and clearness of 
thought and expression than these characteristic pro- 
ductions. Their calling, as they practised it, both 
required and enriched that thing of many definitions 
— a liberal education. 

With the superseding of sails by steam it was inevi- 
table that much of what would be called, but for 
McAndrew, the romance of the sea, must disappear. 
One of the changes from the old to the new conditions 
has hardly yet ceased to manifest itself. The " forest 
of masts " with which such a harbor side as that of 
Boston used to be lined, is still gradually dwindling 
away. In the place of the old tangle of spars and cord- 
age now appear gigantic funnels, comparatively few, 
and slender pole-masts innocent of yards. A single 
funnel, however, may rise above a cargo of fifty times 
greater tonnage than that of a sailing ship a century 
ago. Add to this the considerations of speed and fre- 
quent voyages, of the quick lading and discharging of 
cargoes by modern methods, and the new romance of 
magnitude belongs wholly to our epoch of steam. 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL i8i 

For what the new epoch was to bring in the way of 
rapid transatlantic service, Boston was in some meas- 
ure prepared by the Hnes of Liverpool sailing packets 
established in 1822 and in 1827. Of one of the ves- 
sels of the earlier line, the Emerald, there is a tradition 
that once she made the voyage to Liverpool and back 
in thirty-two days. Besides speed these sailing packets 
offered to patrons what was considered at the time a 
high degree of comfort. In this matter of packets 
sailing at regular intervals, however. New York was 
somewhat in advance of Boston. New York, more- 
over, had the distinction of greeting the steamers 
Sirius and Great Western on their arrival on consecu- 
tive April days of 1838. It was the successful return 
of these two ships to England that stirred the British 
admiralty to action — with what good results to Boston 
we shall see. 

The action of the admiralty was to invite proposals 
for carrying the royal mails from Liverpool to Halifax, 
Quebec, and Boston. Mr. Samuel Cunard, an enter- 
prising merchant of Halifax, had long been considering 
the possibilities of transatlantic steam service. Here 
was his opportunity, and the bid which he promptly 
made for this postal route was accepted at a contract 
price of ^55,000 a year. Halifax was to be the east- 
ern terminus, from which smaller boats were to run to 
Boston and Quebec. To this arrangement some ener- 
getic citizens of Boston entered an immediate protest. 
The resolutions which they passed, April 20, 1839, 
a week after the promise of the new line reached 



1 82 BOSTON 

Boston, pointed out the advantage of using Halifax 
merely as a place of call and making Boston the true 
terminus. It happened that just at that time the north- 
eastern boundary dispute, over the line between Maine 
and New Brunswick, was at a critical point. Shrewdly 
enough the Boston resolutions, referring to this dis- 
pute, expressed the faith of the meeting in the new 
" enterprise as a harbinger of future peace, both with 
the mother country and the provinces, being persuaded 
that frequent communication is the most effectual mode 
to wear away all jealousies and prejudices which are 
not yet extinguished." The resolutions hastily de- 
spatched to Mr. Cunard reacheci him on the point of 
his leaving London for America. He lost no time in 
taking them to the Lords of the Admiralty, offering, 
as Mr. H. A. Hill has summed it up, "to increase 
the size and power of his ships, and to extend the main 
route to Boston, promising also, half jocosely, to settle 
the northeastern boundary question, if they would add 
ten thousand pounds per annum to the subsidy. His 
proposition was accepted, and a new contract was 
signed in May." So it was that Boston, destined to 
fall far below New York as a port for transatlantic 
steamers, secured the early supremacv, and perhaps 
made its own contribution to the settlement of the 
boundary dispute. 

So used is the human mind becoming to the mar- 
vellous in triumphs over nature that the first comers 
from Europe by air ship — if they ever come — will 
probably receive a less enthusiastic welcome than that 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 183 

which the city of Boston extended to the first arriving 
Cunarders. In June and July of 1840 the Unicorn 
and the Britannia came safe to the new docks of the 
company in East Boston. Banquets, salutes, and many 
flags celebrated the events. No doubt local pride 
played an important part in the Boston sentiment of 
this time. Within four years this pride was put to the 
test. The New York papers had been pointing out 
all the contrasts, unfavorable to Boston, between the 
ports of the two cities. As if indeed to adorn their 
tale, Boston harbor froze over in January of 1844, and 
the advertised sailing of the Britannia then in dock 
seemed surely to be impossible. But the merchants 
of Boston would not have it so. They met and voted 
to cut a way, at their own expense, through the ice, 
that the steamer might sail practically on time. The 
contract for cutting the necessary channels was given 
to merchants engaged like Frederic Tudor in the ex- 
port of ice — not from the harbor. Their task was 
to cut within the space of three days a channel about 
ten miles long. For tools they had the best machinery 
used in cutting fresh-water ice, and horse-power was 
employed. The ice was from six to twelve inches in 
thickness. As the Advertiser of February 2, 1 844, 
described the scene : " A great many persons have 
been attracted to our wharves to witness the operations, 
and the curious spectacle of the whole harbor frozen 
over, and the ice has been covered by skaters, sleds, 
and even sleighs. Tents and booths were erected upon 
the ice, and some parts of the harbor bore the appear- 



1 84 BOSTON 

ance of a Russian holiday scene." On February 3 the 
work was done, and the Britannia^ steaming slowly 
through the lane of open water, lined on either side by 
thousands of cheering spectators, made her way to 
the sea. Whatever the New York critics may have 
thought, the English managers of the company must 
have felt that the people of Boston were good friends 
to have. 

In the natural course of events other lines besides 
the Cunard were established ; and if the outreaching 
spirit of Boston had travelled as rapidly overland to 
the west as it had always moved by sea, there would 
probably be nothing but progress to record of Boston 
as a port. Writing of the time when the first Cunard- 
ers came, Mr. Hill reminds us "that the trains start- 
ing from Boston then reached their limits respectively 
at Newburyport, Exeter, Nashua, Springfield, Stoning- 
ton, and New Bedford." It was not long before the 
western railroad frontier was pushed from Springfield 
to Albany and the Hudson. But here, unhappily, it 
stopped, and for nearly thirty years, so far as through 
lines were concerned, it went no farther. During 
this period quarrels between the two lines that trav- 
ersed Massachusetts, and the deadening influence of 
state aid where private enterprise should have been at 
work, had the most untoward results. Far to the west 
the development of the Michigan Central and the 
Chicago, Burlington, and Ouincy railroads, largely 
through Boston capital and energv, spoke for what 
might have been done nearer home. Meanwhile the 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 187 

western railroad connections with New York were 
wisely and rapidly improved. To quote from Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams : " While the great corpora- 
tions which served other cities were absorbing into 
themselves the thoroughfares in the valley of the 
Mississippi, the Legislature of the State of Massachu- 
setts kept its eyes steadily fixed on the Hoosac Moun- 
tain." To this, with other causes, was due the decline 
of Boston shipping. The important commerce with 
Calcutta reached its climax in the years between 1856 
and 1859, ^"'^ thereafter gradually fell away, to the 
advantage of New York. So it was with other 
branches of maritime trade. In 1868 the Cunard 
Company, which for the first eight years of its exist- 
ence had run no vessels to New York, transferred all 
its mail steamers to the rival port, and sent to Boston 
only freighters, which after loading in Boston pro- 
ceeded to New York to complete their cargoes. For 
nearly three years not a single steamer sailed from 
Boston direct to Liverpool. Then came the revival. 
The representatives of railroads, steamships, and the 
Board of Trade put their heads together, and matters 
began to mend. Year by year the volume of exports 
and imports showed a steady, healthy growth, until 
Boston has found herself, if not as of old the first port 
of America, yet one which at last reaps the commercial 
advantages belonging to the town of Emerson's defini- 
tion, with its streets leading not only " downward to 
the sea," but also, as the railroads tardily did their 
work, " landward to the west." 



1 88 BOSTON 

It is a partial view of the outreaching spirit of Bos- 
ton — especially as Boston may be taken as typical 
of New England — which ignores the expression that 
spirit found in the establishment of Christian missions 
in the islands of the sea and the kingdoms beyond. 
Whatever one may think of that work, its means and 
its ends, the facts remain that the nineteenth century 
saw its beginnings in America, that the " orthodox " 
churches of New England were the pioneers in the 
work, and that the men at home whose financial sup- 
port made it possible were frequently of that commer- 
cial class in whose interest the ships of Boston sailed 
abroad. This is not to say that the " merchant princes " 
of Boston were largely imbued with the spirit which has 
been most active in carrying Christianity to foreign 
lands. They were not. But throughout the nine- 
teenth century there was a constant element in the 
community — in Boston and all New England towns 
— which derived from its Puritan ancestry so firm a 
faith in its modes of spiritual life as inherently the life 
for every man of every race that the maintenance ot 
American missions became a vital duty. It is not the 
least significant aspect of this portion of New England 
history that the secular record of it is extremely meagre. 
This may probably be ascribed to the fact that the 
men and women for the records of whose zeal and 
generosity we look in vain were not of the class which 
either writes or becomes the theme of biography. 
They were of the rank and file, and for that reason 
surely should not be overlooked. 



THE HUB AND THE WHEEL 189 

Whether we turn, then, to the great merchants or 
to the clerks and gentlewomen who sent forth their 
small adventures, or yet to that other class whose 
adventures were for spiritual ends, we find in the 
Boston community a constant quality of distant vision 
belying the reputation of the town for contented ab- 
sorption in its own affairs. The Autocrat's image of 
the hub, adopted by all the world, carried with it an 
inevitable picture of the " tire of all creation." It 
would be but a sorry hub that was no better for the 
wheel at the end of its spokes. To those who have 
determined the relations of Boston with the world at 
large, the town has owed many of its best things. 
The distinguished merchants won their distinction not 
so much by their wealth as by the integrity which 
earned it and the generosity which devoted it to 
public uses. A list of the foundations for charitable 
and educational purposes in and about Boston — such 
as a " Perkins Institution," a " Parkman Professorship," 
a " Bromfield Fund" — would reveal to the statistical 
mind a large proportion of names identified with the 
mercantile history of the place. To bring silk and 
spices from over seas, to win the fight with pirates, to 
open a frozen harbor to the early steamships, to tunnel 
a mountain and reach the west — all these are fine, 
brave things. Yet it is more to make your native 
town the richer by the spirit which has triumphed over 
such difficulties and by the fruits of that spirit. This 
is what the merchants of Boston have done. 



VII 

THE BOSTON RELIGION 



/".■.•»?^i^.- 



^\ T 

W X. the Boston minister who in 



T is a fact worth noticing that 



-/ ,- V-: {-"^''^ 1750 preached a political ser- 

||;a' ';.L , A^ i mon which has frequently been 

\|\Cr/ - " ;' ^f'-'^' - ^ called " the morning gun of the 
\N.^-r '^" I-":// Revolution" was, after Roger 
'^'^-SlSI^'^l^ ^iUi^j^s^ (-}^e f^i-sj- prominent 

dissenter from the established 
church of New England. Both the Unitarians and the 
Universalists claim the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew as their 
first representative in the Boston ministry. A person 
is often the best illustration of a tendency, and that 
which the minister of the West Church illustrates is 
the parallelism of freedom in political and religious 
thought. The American revolt from the established 
civil authority began and amazingly throve in Boston. 
It was but natural, therefore, that the first and most 
conspicuous departure from the accepted order of things 
in religion should have the same local background. 
The fact that the severity of the Puritan order of New 
England gave wider room for reaction than could be 
found elsewhere, only enhances the fitness of the scene. 
Local in its causes and conditions, the ecclesiastical 

190 



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3 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 193 

revolution which followed the political belongs yet 
more intimately to local history. But it is so inter- 
mingled with the history of religious progress in the 
last century that once again the local records take on 
a broader significance. 

How truly the Calvinistic Congregationalism of New 
England was the established church, we hardly need 
remind ourselves. It was the faith once delivered to 
the saints, the Puritan fathers, and duly received from 
them ; it was guarded by civil laws taxing the whole 
community for church support, and dealing with eccle- 
siastical affairs as they are treated only where church 
and state are one. Into the ministry of this order 
gradually crept during the closing years of the eigh- 
teenth century many doubts regarding doctrines hitherto 
accepted without question, especially the doctrine of 
the Trinity and of human depravity. From the " Great 
Awakening," before the middle of the century, there 
must needs have been a re-awakening with revulsions 
of feeling. Free political inquiry doubtless played 
its own part in the change. Perhaps, too, the general 
emancipation of thought which the first burst of sym- 
pathy with the French Revolution brought to many 
Americans had its indirect influence. The similar 
change of sentiment in Salem has been said to have 
come " through its navigators even more than through 
its critics and theologians. As soon as they came into 
those warm latitudes, their crusts of prejudice melted 
and cracked from them like films of ice ; and in place 
of the narrow tradition they carried out with them, they 



194 BOSTON 

brought home the germs of a broad reHgion of human- 
ity." The conservatism of the inland towns as com- 
pared with the seaports — Boston even more than 
Salem — lends some color to this theory of a Unita- 
rian writer. Whatever the local influences may have 
been, it is declared that by the year 1 800 there was 
hardly a single occupant of a Congregational pulpit in 
Boston whose orthodoxy would have stood unchal- 
lenged fifty years later. The zeal of the minority in 
the open division soon to come between the old and 
the new theology is the more remarkable when these 
unequal numbers are remembered. 

When the nineteenth century began there was but 
one church in Boston avowedly Unitarian. That was 
King's Chapel, and its case was anomalous. The mere 
statement that " the first Episcopal Church in New 
England became the first Unitarian Church in Amer- 
ica" sums up the strange situation. With the departure 
of the Tories, who before the Revolution had formed 
a large part of the congregation, its use for the services 
of the Church of England seemed to come to a natural 
end. Even its name of King's Chapel was changed by 
the people of Boston, though never by vote of the 
parish, to the " Stone Chapel," and so it was com- 
monly called well into the nineteenth century. For 
five years before 1782 it was used by the Old South 
congregation. Then the young James Freeman took 
charge of the reassembled flock as " reader." But the 
strong Unitarian influences of the time rendered many 
formulae of the Book of Common Prayer difficult for 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 195 

him and the people to repeat with sincerity. Accord- 
ingly they authorized him to revise the Prayer-book. 

Revision was in the air. Only a few years later a 
minister vigilant for the ancient faith discovered in a 
Boston bookstore a version of the Divine and Moral 
Songs of Dr. Watts, out of which the doctrines of the 
Trinity and the Divinity of Christ had been carefully 
edited. The good man promptly exposed it in a news- 
paper article under the title " Beware of Counterfeits." 

Of the Prayer-book revision it may be said that the 
Protestant Episcopal Church of America had as yet no 
definite organization, and the King's Chapel congrega- 
tion — always in dissent from the established church 
of New England — felt itself under no obligation to 
wait till the new Episcopal Church adapted the Eng- 
lish Prayer-book to American use. This was not 
accomplished till 1789. Mr. Freeman, however, did 
wish to remain in the Anglican communion, and applied 
for Episcopal ordinatiop both to Bishop Seabury of 
Connecticut and to Bishop Provoost of New York. 
Their only course was to refuse his application ; for 
revising the Trinity out of the liturgy, which they were 
sworn to support, was not atoned for even by so com- 
mendable an addition to the catechism as the question, 
" In what manner should we treat the inferior animals V 
Denied Episcopal ordination, Mr. Freeman did not find 
it difficult to persuade himself and his congregation 
that laymen could ordain him with equal validity. 
Whereupon, in 1787, certain members of the Chapel 
congregation handed him a Bible, with appropriate 



196 BOSTON 

words, and he became their minister — the first pro- 
fessedly Unitarian minister in America. There were 
protests from Episcopal clergymen and from some ot 
the proprietors of the church, expressing a sense of 
wrong and loss which time has not wholly removed. 
Later on there were complications, both serious and 
amusing, in the administering of moneys bequeathed 
by loyal churchmen before the Revolution. But Mr. 
Freeman's step was never retraced ; indeed, subsequent 
revisions have removed the Chapel liturgy even farther 
than he carried it from that of the King. 

What the constant use of a liturgy, with a fixed form 
of words, obliged Mr. Freeman to do openly, the other 
ministers of Boston, left to their own devices in the 
conduct of public worship, could and did achieve almost 
unnoticed. Instead of denying the doctrine of the 
Trinity and other tenets more purely Calvinistic, it 
became their practice to ignore such matters. There 
were still many points upon which teachers of Chris- 
tianity were agreed, and on them the emphasis was 
laid. So it might have gone on in peace and quietness 
for years to come, but for the fatal propensity of small 
causes to lead to great effects. 

The filling of the vacant Hollis Professorship of 
Divinity at Harvard in 1805 was one of these causes. 
The election of the Rev. Henry Ware, whose 
spoken and written words had shown him a pro- 
nounced Unitarian, was bitterly contested, but without 
avail. The orthodox Overseers and friends of the 
college saw in Mr. Ware's appointment nothing but 




King's Chapel, corner of School anu Tremont streets. 



THE BOSTON RELIGION" 



99 



danger and disaster. Their spokesman was the Rev. 
Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown, father of the in- 
ventor of the Morse alphabet of telegraphy. His 
pamphlet on The True Reasons for opposing Mr. 
Ware's election set forth the undoubted Calvinistic 
orthodoxy of Mr. Hollis, the London merchant whose 
bequest supported the professorship, and the particular 
pains he took, even to receiving a bond from the cor- 
poration, to insure the administration of the fund in 
accordance with his views. Dr. Morse further com- 
plained that he was not permitted to present these 
reasons to the Overseers, and that in spite of Mr. 
Ware's known antagonism to the theologv specified in 
the Hollis bequest, the college did not trouble itself 
to examine into his views. 

The pamphlet was the first of many trumpet calls 
ringing with the question, " Who is on the Lord's 
side ? " Thenceforth it was hard for the neutral- 
minded to escape taking some definite position. Ten 
years after the pamphlet was written. Dr. Morse 
wrote of it : " It was then and has been ever since, 
considered by one class of people as my unpardonable 
offence, and by another class as the best thing I ever 
did. One of the former party is said to have declared 
soon after its publication that it was so bad a thing that 
it would more than counterbalance all the good I had 
done or should do if I lived ever so long; and one of 
the other party said, if I had never done any good 
before I made that publication nor should do any 
afterward, that single deed would of itself produce 



200 BOSTON 

effects of sufficient importance and utility to mankind 
to be worth living for." 

When an atmosphere is charged with opposing con- 
victions of such positiveness, the next disturbance is 
merely a question of time. Meanwhile, in natural 
sequence from the Mollis Professorship dispute, came 
the founding of the Andover Seminary (1808) and the 
Park Street Church (1809), as strong pillars of Ortho- 
doxy. The explosion that soon followed, in 1815, was 
due in large measure again to the hand of Dr. Morse. 
In Belsham's life of the English Unitarian, Lindsey, 
appeared a chapter on American Unitarianism, contain- 
ing letters from Boston which showed how many of 
the ministers outwardly Orthodox were at heart Uni- 
tarian, and in this word, as used by an Englishman, 
there was implied a much lower conception of the 
divine nature of Christ than that which really prevailed 
in Boston. Here, thought Dr. Morse, was damaging 
testimony. He caused the chapter to be reprinted in 
Boston as a pamphlet, which he proceeded to review 
in his magazine. The Panoplist. The upshot of his con- 
tention was that the time had come for calling things 
by their right names : if the Boston ministers were 
Unitarian, let them be known as such, and let the 
Orthodox deny them Christian fellowship, or pulpit 
exchanges. Are you of the Boston religion or of the 
Christian religion ? was his crucial question ; to which, 
after the Yankee fashion, a Boston layman, John 
Lowell, made answer by a counter-question in the 
pamphlet, Are you a Christian or a Calvinist ? 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 201 

Thus the dividing lines were clearly drawn at last, 
and those who most wished to avoid partisanship and 
controversy found themselves involved in both. To 
the Unitarians especially a controversy was unwelcome. 
They objected to the very name of Unitarian. As Dr. 
G. E. Ellis has expressed their feeling, " The term 
Orthodoxy covers the whole faith of one party ; the 
term Unitarian is at best but a definition of one of 
the doctrinal tenets of the other party." There were 
those who preferred and used the name of " liberal 
Christians." Against this term stood the feeling of 
those for whom Dr. N. L. Frothingham said, " To 
insinuate that others are illiberal is certainly a strange 
way of proving one's generosity." To set themselves 
off as a sect at all was indeed the last thing they 
wanted. Their very pride was in individual judg- 
ment — the protestant's right to everlasting protest. 
" If any two of us, walking arm in arm on one side of 
a street," said their historian, " should find that we 
perfectly accorded in opinion, we should feel bound 
to separate instantly, and the strife would be as to 
which should get the start in crossing." Yet if these 
differing brothers were drawn into controversy against 
their will, our sympathy must not be all with them ; 
the more united body which had to contend with so 
elusive a foe is also to be remembered. To them the 
sermon which William Ellery Channing, the recog- 
nized leader of the " liberals," preached at the ordina- 
tion of Jared Sparks at Baltimore, in 18 19, must have 
been a welcome production. It gave them something 



202 BOSTON 

definite to attack. Under the characteristic text, 
" Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good," it 
stated clearly the beliefs and disbeliefs of Unitarian 
Christianity, though it does not appear that the 
name by which his sect was to be known once passed 
the preacher's lips. 

None had been more reluctant than Dr. Channing 
to see a new sect founded. As Wesley at first would 
have kept Methodism within the Church of England, 
so Channing would have preferred to see the Congre- 
gational body undivided, but leavened by Unitarianism. 
To his opponents, on the other hand, the Baltimore 
sermon served as the signal gun of a pamphlet war. 
The Andover professors, Leonard Woods and Moses 
Stuart, came briskly on the field with Letters to 
Unitarians and Letters to Dr. Channing. To Dr. 
Woods, the Rev. Henry Ware made prompt reply, 
and typical of the persistency of the combatants 
stand the titles in Dr. Woods's collected works of a 
Reply to Dr. Ware's Letters (1821) and Remarks 
on Dr. Ware's Answer (1822). To follow the war- 
fare, even in such lists of battlefields, would be 
no small task. Of its rancorous temper on both 
sides there is too abundant testimony. As in most 
religious disputes, there was no initial agreement upon 
the terms of controversy. Each side maintained that 
the other misrepresented its views, and treated as its 
own peculiar possessions, beliefs and sacraments com- 
mon to all Christians. The Unitarians complained 
especially that the Calvinists refused to interpret fairly 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 203 

or abide by the words of Calvin. On the other hand, 
a Unitarian historian has written even of the gentle, 
honest, Channing's Baltimore sermon, " No believer 
in the Trinity that ever lived, it may be, would admit 
his statement of it to be correct." Still another 
historian. Dr. Ellis, admits with regret " the super- 
ciliousness and effrontery even, with which some 
Unitarians took for granted that the great change in 
religious opinions and methods advocated by them 
could perfect and establish itself in this community as 
a matter of course. . . . The most assured and con- 
fident of the new party did not scruple to declare that 
Orthodoxy was past apologizing for, and ought to 
retire gracefully with the bats and owls." 

All this was disturbing enough to a town in which 
the church, the clergy, and religious matters had been 
from the first of paramount importance. But to the 
theological odium and ill temper were added the 
complications of the civil law. If there was ground 
for Orthodox complaint in the administration of the 
Hollis legacy, there was ample provocation to action 
at law when the conservatives saw the church buildings, 
lands, and plate pass into the hands of the liberals. 
The process of change from the old to the new faith 
came about In various ways, frequently through the 
death or retirement of the old and more conservative 
minister, and the election of a young apostle of the 
new from Cambridge. Thus Lyman Beecher saw and 
described the means by which the Unitarians won their 
ends : " They have sowed tares while men slept, and 



204 



BOSTON 




Lyman Bekcher. 



grafted heretical churches on Orthodox stumps, and 
this is still their favorite plan. Everywhere, when the 
minister dies, some society's committee will be cut and 
dried, ready to call in a Cambridge student, split the 
church, get a majority of the society, and take house, 
funds, and all." The minority defeated in such divi- 
sions resisted and sometimes established a new parish. 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 205 

To this they felt, and contended, that the prop- 
erty of the church should pass. But the courts of 
Massachusetts upheld the opposite contention. In 
the test case of the Dedham parish (1820), which 
provided precedents for future decisions, the Supreme 
Court put itself on record with a ruling highly favora- 
ble to the claims generally made by the Unitarians in 
such disputes. In 1830 Chief Justice Shaw handed 
down a decision, in the case of a country parish, that 
although only two church members remained with 
the church when the Orthodox minister and all the 
rest of his people seceded, those two were the church, 
and retained all its property. As Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, writing of the period of Lyman Beecher's 
Boston ministry, regarded such verdicts: " The judges 
on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which 
the peculiar features of church organization, so care- 
fully ordained by the Pilgrim fathers, had been nulli- 
fied." Even after the middle of the century, an 
Orthodox critic of the controversy wrote : " Church 
after church was plundered of its property, even to 
its communion furniture and records. We called this 
proceeding plunder thirty years ago. We call it by 
the same hard name now. And we solemnly call 
upon those Unitarian churches, which are still in pos- 
session of this plunder, to return it. They cannot 
prosper with it. And we call upon the courts of 
Massachusetts to revoke these unrighteous decisions, 
and put the Congregational churches of the state upon 
their original and proper basis." 



2o6 BOSTON 

In 1833 the Massachusetts law formally separated 
the functions of church and town. Thus the dis- 
establishment which had already been virtually ac- 
complished in Boston became a fact throughout the 
commonwealth. Of course the believers in the old 
order regarded the whole change with genuine pain 
and sorrow. In every process of evolution it is the 
fate of the minority to suffer something at the hands 
of the greater number. Here the simple fact, in 
Boston and the towns most directly under its influence, 
rather than in the state at large, was that the majority 
of those who inherited the best traditions of Puritanism 
had come to prefer a less rigid form of faith, which 
took its form, natural to the time and place, in 
Unitarianism. It was not through any infusion of 
new blood into the community that the change came 
about. In the straitest sect of New Englanders the 
" liberals " found their best strength. From whatever 
cause, they " looked about them," as Professor Wendell 
has said, " and honestly found human nature reassur- 
ing." It was not in their Calvinistic neighbors that 
they discovered any such encouragement. Dr. Chan- 
ning in his Baltimore sermon delivered the following 
opinion of the Orthodox theology : " By shocking, as 
it does, the fundamental principles of morality, and by 
exhibiting a severe and partial Deity, it tends strongly 
to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, for- 
bidding, and servile religion, and to lead men to 
substitute censoriousness, bitterness, and persecution 
for a tender and impartial charity." Nearly fifty years 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 



207 




William Ellery Channing Monument, Arlington Street. 
Bronze by Herbert Adams. 

later, we find Dr. Ellis making what he justly calls a 
" frank assertion " : " We do not like the strictly 
Orthodox type of character, certainly not till it has 
been modified, humanized, and liberalized. We deem 
it harsh, ungenial, narrow, repulsive, not winning, 
gracious, expansive, or attractive. It is in our view 
but an inadequate expression of our ideal of a Christian 
character." Here are words as uncompromising as 
the Orthodox attitude toward " plunder." They are 



2o8 BOSTON 

worth recalling if only as evidences of the honest con- 
viction held by each party that the other was hope- 
lessly in the wrong. Furthermore, by learning where 
the reassuring qualities of human nature were not 
found, we may readily infer where they were. 

There is no doubt that as the Boston Unitarians — 
say of the third decade of the century — looked upon 
their clergy, they beheld admirable types of Christian 
gentlemen. They were in an important sense leaders 
in the community, men of that personal distinction 
which is due both to breeding and to scholarship, car- 
rying names long identified with the best things of 
New England life, — Channing, Frothingham, Palfrey, 
Lothrop, Parkman, Gannett, Pierpont, Lowell, Ripley 
— true representatives of Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin 
caste." In Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past it is said ; 
" On the topmost round of the social ladder stood the 
clergy ; for although the lines of theological separation 
among themselves were deeply cut, the void between 
them and the laity was even more impassable." From 
the same source we learn that Dr. Channing deeply 
regretted this obstacle to familiar intercourse, and envied 
those who could know men just as they are. " My 
profession," he said, " requires me to deal with such 
men as actually exist, yet I can never see them except 
in disguise." 

It was this very desire to get at the essential man 
which found its expression in the Unitarian sermons 
of the time. The ministers are described as " absorbed 
in the endeavor to apply Christianity to personal con- 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 209 

duct, taking men and women one by one and trusting 
to their influence for the regeneration of society." 
The preaching, therefore, was strongly ethical rather 
than doctrinal ; the dignity, not the depravity, of 
human nature was, as it has since more generally 
grown to be, the quality which every listener must 
be taught to recognize in himself, to the end that indi- 
vidual excellence might by degrees redeem the world. 
Withal, a supernatural element in religion, a divine reve- 
lation of Christian truth, were by no means discarded. 
Under such teaching, to which the laity really gave 
attention, a definite type of character was produced. 
It is described by Dr. O. B. Frothingham in his Boston 
Unitarianism, and, making all allowance for the fact 
that he wrote of the men who shared most intimately 
the influences of his own training, it would probably 
be hard to frame a more accurate description: "In 
meditating on the character of these men, one is re- 
minded of the good Samuel Sewall. Of course the 
softening influence of one hundred and fifty years had 
produced its effect. There was less reference to divine 
interposition, less literalness in interpreting Scripture, 
less bluntness, less superstition, if we may use so harsh 
a word in speaking of that sweet soul. But there was 
the same integrity, the same conscientiousness, the same 
directness of dealing, the same respect for learning, the 
same reverence for piety, the same punctiliousness of 
demeanor, the same urbanity. They were not re- 
formers, or ascetics, or devotees. All idealists were 
visionaries in their esteem. Those who looked for a 



2IO BOSTON 

' kingdom of heaven ' were dreamers. They went to 
church ; they had family prayers as a rule, though by 
no means universally. It was customary to say grace 
at meat. They wished they were holy enough to adorn 
the communion ; they believed the narratives in the 
Bible, Old Testament and New." 

That these nineteenth-century Samuel Sewalls and 
their spiritual teachers believed they had attained the 
best and ultimate form of religion is perhaps not sur- 
prising. The most respectable local opinion did every- 
thing to confirm this belief. Harvard College and 
nearly all the influences of wealth and fashion in Bos- 
ton were powerful allies of the new faith. " When 
Dr. Beecher came to Boston," wrote his daughter, 
Mrs. Stowe, " Calvinism or Orthodoxy was the de- 
spised and persecuted form of faith. It was the 
dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted 
mendicant in the city where once it had held court, 
and Unitarianism reigned in its stead." The ministry 
of Lyman Beecher at the Hanover Street Church, 
from 1826 to 1832, during the first half of which time 
his son Edward had charge of the Park Street Church, 
may be taken to mark the end of the active contro- 
versy between the conservatives and the liberals. The 
spirit with which this " Philistine Giant " came out of 
Connecticut to fight for the old order is best expressed 
in his own words: " It is here," he wrote of Boston 
in 1826, "that New England is to be regenerated, the 
enemy driven out of the temple they have usurped 
and polluted, the college to be rescued, the public sen- 



-^^ 








Park Street Church about 1850. 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 213 

timent to be revolutionized and restored to evangelical 
tone." It was a difficult task he set himself. "The 
Unitarians," he declared, " with all their principles of 
toleration, were as really a persecuting power while 
they had the ascendency as ever existed. Wives and 
daughters were forbidden to attend our meetings ; and 
the whole weight of political, literary, and social in- 
fluence was turned against us, and the lash of ridicule 
laid on without stint." Against these obstacles he 
labored manfully, with sermons, writings, and revival 
meetings. How terribly vital was the faith for which 
he contended one may realize by reading the letters 
which passed between him and his children struggling 
toward a full acceptance of that faith. Yet with all 
his zeal and brilliant gifts it was beyond his power to 
stem the tide — to expel the enemy, save the college, 
and turn public sentiment into its old channels. No 
single man, or band of men, could have accomphshed 
such results. Even before he came to Boston, the 
Unitarians, many of them reluctantly, had set up the 
machinery of a sect — a name, periodicals of their own, 
and a definite organization. Less than ten years after 
his departure. Dr. Channing is found lamenting the 
fact that the denomination, pledged originally to 
progress, had grown stationary, that at last there was 
a Unitarian Orthodoxy. 

The discovery that one set of opinions is orthodox 
and another not is never made till some new protestant 
arises with his fresh protest. So the " Unitarian con- 
troversy " had begun ; so the second controversy, 



214 



BOSTON 



this time within the denomination itself, was intro- 
duced by Emerson and Theodore Parker. In 1838 
Emerson deHvered his " Divinity School Address " at 




Lyman Beecher's Church, Bowdoin Street; now The Church of 
St. John the Evangelist. 

Harvard — a declaration of individualism which was 
held heretical even at the headquarters of heterodoxy. 
A year later the Rev. Andrews Norton, the interpreter 
of Scripture whose scholarly word was almost authori- 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 215 

tative In the Unitarian body, deplored, in a discourse 
on "The Latest Form of InfideHty," the current 
tendencies of theological thought. But Emerson had 
already separated himself from the Unitarian ministry 
by reason of an imperfect sympathy with his Boston 
parishioners regarding the administration of the Lord's 
Supper. He could speak, therefore, as one somewhat 
outside the fold. Not so Theodore Parker, in 1841 
minister of the First Church in West Roxbury. In 
this year he delivered his South Boston sermon on 
the Transient and Permanent in Christianity. Parker 
had been known hitherto chiefly as the most practical 
and ethical of preachers. He had even taken for his 
theme on one occasion the duties, temptations, and 
trials peculiar to milkmen. In the South Boston 
sermon, fairly entering the field of doctrinal contro- 
versy, he startled all conservative Unitarians by the 
bold declaration that Christianity needed no support 
from miracles, and that it could still stand firm, as the 
absolute religion, even if it could be proved that its 
founder had never lived. 

The disestablishment of the Puritan Church in 
Boston was, of course, a thing of the past at the time 
of Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon. Yet the 
treatment his radicalism received presents so close a 
parallel to the effects of the original dissent from Calvin- 
ism as to afford a significant sequel to the earlier story. 
Indeed, the very phrases of the outcry of twenty and 
thirty years before repeat themselves. Channing 
doubted whether Parker could even be called a Chris- 



2i6 BOSTON 

tian. " Without miracles," he declared, " the historical 
Christ is gone," From Dr. Frothingham came the 
complaint: "The difference between Trinitarians and 
Unitarians is a difference in Christianity ; the dif- 
ference between Mr. Parker and the Association [of 
Unitarian ministers] is a difference between no Chris- 
tianity and Christianity." A Unitarian layman wrote 
to a secular paper: "I would rather see every Unita- 
rian congregation in our land dissolved, and every one of 
our churches occupied by other denominations or razed 
to the ground, than to assist in placing a man entertain- 
ing the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our 
pulpits." The Orthodox looked on, no doubt with a 
certain natural satisfaction, and asked, " What could 
you expect ? " Some of his fellow-ministers raised 
the question of expelling Parker from their local Asso- 
ciation. This was not carried, but, forced to recognize 
the strong feeling in the Association that he should 
withdraw, Parker absented himself from the meetings. 
Meanwhile the old familiar method of" denying Chris- 
tian fellowship," and refusing pulpit exchanges, came 
into play, and Parker found himself standing practi- 
cally alone. When James Freeman Clarke showed the 
independence to exchange pulpits with him, it was with 
the result that fifteen of his most powerful parishion- 
ers, with their families, joined themselves to another 
church. 

The Orthodox question, " What could you expect? " 
had more reason behind it than the conservative 
Unitarians, in the security of what they believed an 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 



217 




ultimate faith, would have been willing to admit. 
Theodore Parker, with his indifference to all bonds of 
tradition and his inability to hold a strong belief with- 
out uttering it, needed only the atmosphere in which 
he lived to make him just 
what he was. The same /^ ' -^^ 

condition which made him, 
in the telling local phrase, 
a " come-outer," had pre- 
pared a very considerable 
body of " come-outers," 
eager to hear and follow 
him. If the Unitarian 
movement in Boston stood 
for any one thing above 
all others, it was for lib- 
erty of thought and speech, 
the " dissidence of dis- 
sent " carried over from 
the time of Burke into the 
nineteenth century. So it 
was that Theodore Parker 
was an entirely characteristic local figure, adding free- 
dom of political thought, when the slavery question 
became paramount, to his freedom of religious discus- 
sion. So it was that the independent Sunday services 
which he held in Music Hall filled an important place 
in the lives of the large radical following drawn by his 
fervid personality to desert the orthodox Unitarianism. 
Heretic of heretics as he was in his day, his latest 







Theodore Parker. 

Bust by W. W. Story, in the Boston 
Public Library. 



2i8 BOSTON 

biographer, the Rev. John White Chadwick, who may 
be held to speak as authoritatively as any individual 
may for his denomination, declares : " From then till 
now Unitarian progress has been along the line illumi- 
nated by his beacon-light." 

To follow that line would be to depart far from the 
central theme of this chapter, — the disestabhshment 
of the Puritan church. A full treatment of that 
theme alone would demand a volume. Here it has 
seemed sufficient to point out some of its most signifi- 
cant facts and aspects. They belong peculiarly to 
Boston history. The whole Unitarian movement, in 
its outward manifestations, has meant much more to 
Boston than to any other community, in America or 
elsewhere. With Boston must be reckoned also the 
eastern part of Massachusetts : much that has been 
said about the disestablishment applies to the sur- 
rounding towns quite as much as to the city itself. In 
the remote parts of Massachusetts, as in the country 
at large, the movement, judged by outward results, 
has gone on rather as an eddy by the side of the stream 
than as the main action of the tide. 

The " Unitarian controversy " itself is now far 
enough in the past for men to ask and answer the 
question, which party won ? If to win means to per- 
suade your antagonist that he is wrong, then we must 
call it a drawn battle, for it is certain that those who 
argued for and against the Calvinistic faith ended 
practically where they began. The very process of 
argument served to strengthen their convictions. If 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 219 

Channing could have had his way, to let the Hberal 
leaven work within the established fold, we may well 
imagine that there never would have been that stiffen- 
ing of Orthodoxy which only in recent years has begun 
to relax. How far, on the other hand, the progress 
of liberalism would have been checked, no man can 
say. 

If victory or defeat is to be measured by denomina- 
tional growth — a development which had only a sec- 
ondary interest for those who formed the Unitarian 
denomination — our later view must differ from that 
which the middle of the nineteenth century would have 
presented. In 1850 there were within the limits of 
what is now Boston, thirty-two Unitarian churches ; j 
there are now (1903) twenty-seven. In 1850 there 
were within the same limits twenty-one Congregational 
Trinitarian churches ; to-day there are thirty-three. 
The rapid growth of the Episcopal and other Trinitarian 
Protestant churches might also fairly be added to the 
reckoning. Thus it appears that the Unitarian body 
was no richer in the seeds of outward growth than its 
opponents and some of its friends predicted. 

But these are all external and arbitrary methods of 
counting success or failure. Mrs. Stowe herself sug- 
gested a truer way of regarding the matter when she 
wrote : " This party, called for convenience Unitarian, 
was, in fact, a whole generation in the process of reac- ' 
tion." The process has been one in which all Protes- 
tant denominations have, in greater and less degree, 
shared. From the Unitarians few will now withhold 



220 BOSTON 

the credit of framing the concrete form in which this 
influence has made itself most effectively felt. Their 
early claim that Calvinism soon showed signs of modi- 
fying itself was duly resented by the Orthodox. In 
the commemorative discourse at the fiftieth anniversary 
of the Andover Seminary Dr. Leonard Bacon, looking 
back upon the divisions which had rent the church, 
expressed pity for the comfort the Unitarians took in 
the changes of Calvinistic belief: " Orthodoxy, they 
say, has become liberal and has renounced the horrid 
dogmas which it was charged with holding ; and there- 
fore Unitarianism may be regarded as having accom- 
phshed its mission. Well, if they are satisfied with 
this result, let us be thankful for them that they are so 
easily satisfied. ... If now at last our Unitarian 
friends have really learned, to their own satisfaction, 
that the New England Orthodoxy does not hold the 
obnoxious and oft repudiated dogmas which they have 
so long imputed to it, we may thankfully accept the 
fact as one more proof that the world moves." It is 
in quite a different spirit that the present minister of 
the New Old South speaks, nearly fifty years later, of 
" the vast service that Unitarianism has rendered to 
the Christian belief of the century " ; and he writes : 
" This overdone sense of depravity, hardened into 
dogma, stood for centuries against the truth that the 
morality of God in Christ is the morality for mankind. 
The truth has at last prevailed, and at this point of 
belief Christian people everywhere are under an im- 
mense debt to the great Unitarian leaders." It is in 



"THE BOSTON RELIGION" 221 

admissions, or rather hearty acknowledgments, ot this 
sort, that the true outcome of the Unitarian contro- 
versy may be said to He. And to those who are glad 
to associate Boston with the progress of mankind, 
there is satisfaction in the thought that these great 
Unitarian leaders were eminently the product of local 
conditions. 



VIII 

THE " LITERARY CENTRE 



TheWicktd mam Tort ion. 



A SERMON 

f Pteachtd at ihe L<n«tc m t^ifi in AVir tr^lind ihc 

iSth Jiy of iht 1 Mondh l674.wIi(ntu/omcn 

were ixtcultd, who had murlhtrtd 

thtic Mjntr.) 

Wkcrein ii flicwtj 

7/;4f f xf ?^ in mickfiixft doth Irin^ 
untimely "Death. 



PrOV. 10. 17. 7il ffir gfiht liri frelenitlb d'jtit int th ]tti 1 
tjlhi mikrdHatlh/lirl'rJ. 

Epb. «.!,}. Hanturtij F^hir t'i it; Mlll>ir(whltHlil/!'Jt 
Commandmtitl irith frefKift) ihitt 11 mt) iiwti wilk ihtt, 
snJ ihou mtjfi l,vi Iv^ crt ibi E*rlb, 

P*na ad piutos, meiuj li omnes. 



OUOTATION marks 
are safe enclosures 
for words in danger of 
losing their place. The 
words at the head of this 
chapter have been dragged 
relentlessly from one 
American city to another, 
and have before them a 
prospect of endless migra- 
tion. Their meaning, too, 
is subject to indefinite 
change. The centre may 
be that of the writing, 
the printing, or the read- 
ing of books. A cour- 
ageous confidence is needed to say that this, that, or 
the other place is or will be the " literary centre of 
America." It is the fortune of the present writer to 
be dealing with what has been, and the assertion that 
Boston was the literary centre — without quotation 
marks — during the period in which American litera- 
ture acquired a shelf of its own in the library of the 
race is hardly open to dispute. The production of 



S OS TON. 
Printed by /oi" Fcflir. I tf 7 5 . 



Title-page ov the First Book 
PRINTED IN Boston. 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 223 

books possessing something like permanence is perhaps 
the most characteristic mark of a centre to which the 
term literary^ in its true meaning of " related to litera- 
ture," may be applied. Name the American writers 
whose work has stood the test of half a century, and 
with a few notable exceptions they belong to Boston 
and its neighborhood. All this is thrice familiar. The 
record of it, in outline or detail, is a story which has 
been told by many tongues and many pens. If we 
look rather at the significance of the story, and try to 
give it its place in the longer story of Boston, the more 
immediate purpose will be served. 

Amongst the many fields of activity into which Bos- 
ton has made an early or the earliest entry, the field 
of creative writing — not for instruction or argument 
— can hardly be counted. It is to other places that 
we must look for the first important contributions to 
what is called American literature. Yet in Phila- 
delphia and New York the first-comers, Charles 
Brockden Brown, Irving, and Cooper, each enjoyed 
some of the distinction of the solitary. Brown has 
become a mere name In literary history ; the others 
live. But when they made their appearance, it was 
rather as detached luminaries than as planets or fixed 
stars belonging to a system. The life of the commu- 
nities in which they lived had not reached the organic 
state demanding expression in literature, and finding 
it through the medium of a body, however small, which 
could be called a literary class. In Boston at this early 
period the condition was much the same, with the two 



224 



BOSTON 



differences that the individual writers of distinction 
were yet to appear, and that influences were at work, 
perhaps more powerfully than anywhere else in 
America, toward making a definite expression through 
literature at some later time almost a necessity. We 
have seen how these influences called into being the 
Anthology Club, the Athenaeum, and the North Ameri- 
can Review. The unremitting influence of Harvard 




anj Clrl, l.iy tl.t.i 
prajtrv every ni^-iii and moriiin'^-, v.\<i 
ilk ihcir Pircni-' tliflmK : f ..- \vhi.h 
tioJ Almighiy luvc-, anil bledci shtin. 

CooJ cl.il.lrfn r.mll 
For Cod '.n day. Lo>c ChfiA ll«ly, 

Pinnu cA«>. . In fccret F*aT. 

No rjfc thjnj; (%f, ^1i^J ln(l« play, 

Bycufiolbjy, MAfti>o<klay, 

111 ioui^ W^fi- 



:r/)Sl(^X PRIMKR; 

; ..... % 



kfm:em:i.asd primer. 

i \ I i CHJSMS. 



'^ JL^ 



<„ t; S 



In possession of the Boston Public Library, 



College, sending its sons year by year into the pulpit, 
the counting-houses, and professional offices of Boston, 
has also been touched upon. For the devotion of 
any considerable number of these or other men to the 
pursuit of literature, the time was not yet ripe. Ques- 
tions of politics laid claim to much of the best thought 
of the best thinkers. As before the Revolution, so 
in the active days of the Federalist party, the news- 
paper press abounded in contributions, frequently over 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 225 

classic pseudonyms, from the ablest men in the com- 
munity. Thus the place which the Federalist^ farther 
south, won for itself in the early literature of the coun- 
try was not wholly without its counterpart in the cur- 
rent productions of Boston writers. It was a Boston 
editor, by the way, who is said to have coined the 
phrase, " the era of good feeling," adopted with una- 
nimity by historians of the United States. The influ- 
ences of journalistic writing, however, being those 
which Boston shared with her sister towns, are not of 
present concern. 

Mr. Howells has spoken of the " Augustan age " 
of literature in Boston as "the Unitarian harvest-time 
of the old Puritanic seed-time." It is a good defini- 
tion ; but in the seed-time should surely be included 
the earlier years of the nineteenth century, when Uni- 
tarianism was making its way. One who reads not 
only a chapter on the " Unitarian controversy," but 
also the writings of the leaders in the new movement, 
cannot fail to be impressed with the mere literary skill 
of these writers. Besides having ideas which they 
wished to urge, they knew how to urge them. Their 
grace and cogency of style implied both an effective 
training in the use of the writer's tools and the exist- 
ence of an audience capable of appreciating such use. 
Butterflies are not deliberately brought to a wheel for 
breaking. The very nature of a controversy which 
meant so much to so large a portion of the community 
bespoke the presence of a class to which the things of 
the mind and the spirit were of high importance — 

Q 



226 BOSTON 

a class from which the evolution of a smaller " literary 
class " was easily possible. 

Of the rise of the Transcendental movement the 
Unitarian body as such would have held itself inno- 
cent. A shrewd observer of the intellectual life of 
Boston, the Rev. Dr. O. B. Frothingham, once wrote 
of the place : " It was always remarkable for explo- 
sions of mind." By the conservative element Tran- 
scendentalism was frankly regarded as one of these 
explosions. Of its practical value as a moral agency, 
Father Taylor, the Methodist missionary to sailors, 
probably spoke for many of his contemporaries when 
he said of a Transcendental discourse he had just 
heard : " It would take as many sermons like that to 
conveft a human soul as it would quarts of skimmed 
milk to make a man drunk." In looking back upon 
Transcendentalism, however, and upon the influences 
surrounding its birth, the spirit which animated the 
Unitarian movement, if not Unitarianism itself, stands 
forth conspicuous. As the later religious thought of 
Theodore Parker carried to its conclusion one ten- 
dency of Unitarian thinking, so the philosophic 
thought of Transcendentalism seized upon and car- 
ried out another. The dropping of many traditions 
was the best preparation for that omitting of all tradi- 
tions from the mind, which Emerson considered the 
essence of the new philosophy. 

To the local causes must be added those French and 
German influences which led to the suggestive saying 
that Transcendentalism was " imported in foreign 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 227 

packages." The very origin of its name, as used in 
Boston, seems to be unknown. For its meaning 
George Ripley, about to superintend the experiment 
of Brook Farm, spoke clearly in the summer which 
ended his ministry at the Unitarian church in Pur- 
chase Street : " There is a class of persons who desire 
a reform in the prevailing philosophy of the day. 
These are called Transcendentalists, because they 
believe in an order of truths which transcend the 
sphere of the human senses. Their leading idea is 
the supremacy of mind over matter. Hence they 
maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on 
tradition nor historical facts but has an unerring wit- 
ness in the soul." A less restrained utterance of the 
same philosophy is made by Alcott in one of his 
" Orphic Sayings," in the first number of the Tran- 
scendental Dial : " Believe, youth, that your heart is 
an oracle ; trust her instinctive auguries, obey her 
divine leadings ; nor listen too fondly to the uncertain 
echoes of your head." In words no less characteristic 
of Emerson than the fragment just quoted is of Alcott, 
the magazine is introduced to the world : " Let it be 
such a Dial, not as the dead face of a clock, hardly 
even such as the Gnomon in a garden, but rather such 
a Dial as is the Garden itself, in whose leaves and 
flowers and fruit the suddenly awakened sleeper is in- 
stantly apprised not what part of dead time, but what 
state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving." 
These passages, taken together, will suffice to sug- 
gest the aims of Transcendentalism. It is not needed 



228 BOSTON 

here to trace the rise and fall of Brook Farm (i 841-7), 
the application of Transcendental philosophy to the 
problem of living ; or of the Dial (1840-4), the chief 
organic expression of the movement. All that has 
been abundantly done elsewhere. What is more use- 
ful at this point, in regarding Transcendentalism as an 
influence, is to bear in mind the marked youthfulness 
of many of its followers. Before the Dial appeared 
Emerson commended it to Carlyle for what it would 
show him about " our young people." Again he 
tells Carlyle that it is " a fact for literary history that 
all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite 
ignorant of each other, take the world so " — that is as 
the Transcendentalists take it. When the Dial ceased 
to mark the time, and Brook Farm was approaching 
dissolution, the Harbinger, of which the first number 
was published in June of 1845, joined the voices of 
Transcendentalism in a farewell chorus. Of the chief 
contributors to this number George Ripley, the dean 
in years and service, was forty-three years old. Horace 
Greeley and Cranch were respectively thirty-four and 
thirty-two. Parke Godwin was twenty-nine ; Lowell, 
Story, and Charles A. Dana were each twenty-six ; 
T. W. Higginson was twenty-two, and George William 
Curtis twenty-one. Because the entire movement of 
Transcendentalism was so largely a movement of youth 
it mattered less that, as an outward expression of 
thought and feeling, it came to a definite end. Its 
influence was stamped indelibly on many minds, 
which in their growth would naturally outgrow " ideal- 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 229 

ism as it appeared in 1842," — to use Emerson's defi- 
nition of the philosophy, — but must carry its effects 
through life and spread its influence in many broaden- 
ing circles. Those who acknowledge the greatest 
debt to it recognize its influence not only in literature, 
but in art, religion, politics, equalization of the sexes, 
and every forward movement of the second half of the 
nineteenth century. In spite of its follies and extrav- 
agances, few will deny its general service as a stimu- 
lus to clear thinking and pure living, and therein as an 
educational force felt directly and indirectly through- 
out the community in which it throve. 

Of all the representatives of Transcendentalism, 
Emerson was naturally felt to be the most important, 
and of course has exerted the most enduring personal 
influence. What saved him from complete identifica- 
tion with the movement was his pervading sanity and 
humor. Loyal friend of his Orphic neighbor as he 
was, he could yet record with a certain relish the 
remark of one puzzled auditor of a " Conversation " 
by Alcott : " It seemed to him like going to heaven 
in a swing." It was he also who made what is prob- 
ably the most familiar definition of Brook Farm, — "a 
perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age 
of Reason in a patty-pan." To Ripley, when Brook 
Farm was only a plan, he could write, " If not the 
sunrise, it will be the morning star." But when Ripley 
sought definitely to secure his participation in the ven- 
ture, his sound common sense prompted the answer : 
"My feeHng is that the community is not good for 



230 BOSTON 

me, that it has little to offer me which with resolution 
I cannot procure for myself. ... It seems to me a 
circuitous and operose way of relieving myself to put 
upon your community the emancipation which I ought 
to take on myself. 1 must assume my own vows." 
The same spirit of practical conservatism made him a 
late comer amongst the active opponents of slavery. 
It also marked his point of contact with the element 
of intellectual and social life in Boston from which the 
chief recruits to the ranks of literature were drawn. 

It may fairly be questioned whether the poets, his- 
torians, and other writers of any place besides Boston, 
through a whole period of marked productiveness, 
have represented so clearly as the writers of Boston for 
the second third of the nineteenth century, whatever 
was best in the inheritances and current life of the 
place. Grub Street and Bohemia, often merging into 
the territory of newspapers and publishing offices, 
have elsewhere been a fruitful source of authorship. 
It is an alien criticism of Boston that there " Respecta- 
bility stalks unchecked." The justice of the charge is 
certainly supported by a mere list of the writers who 
brought distinction to their town — a list in which 
Bohemia might expect to be represented if at all. The 
fact is that this undefined country, to which all true 
inheritors of the tavern spirit of Ben Jonson and his 
fellows have owed allegiance, has never had any im- 
portant place within the boundaries of New England. 
The background of the Boston writers was eminently 
that of the circle described in the privately printed 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 231 

volume From Books and Papers of Russell Sturgis: "In 
the first place, then, Boston society was exclusive, as 
by a law of nature ; it was the simple coming together 
of certain families, the younger men and women to 
dance or talk, the elder to talk or dine. It was like a 
large family party ; and there were many who could 
announce the precise degree of relationship between 
any two people in any assembly." This was the Bos- 
ton of the generation born near the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, — a generation which Mr. Julian 
Sturgis, writing the words just quoted, considered 
" exceptionally fortunate in the time of their birth." 
Of a slightly earlier time he writes : " Young Copley 
(afterwards Lord Lyndhurst), revisiting his native 
town in 1796 wrote home to his sister: ' Shall I whis- 
per a word in your ear ? The better people are all 
aristocrats. My father is too rank a Jacobin to live 
among them.' Indeed, it must be confessed that the 
idea of equality in social matters had not even occurred 
to any one ; and that even in the political world it was 
held a matter of course that an Adams or an Otis 
should exercise an influence other and far greater than 
that of one mere voter." Into a society maintaining 
these views and standards for the better part of a cen- 
tury the chief writers of Boston were born. It is worth 
while, then, to look at some of them in their relation 
to the life of which as men they formed a part. 

The name of George Ticknor is not one of the first 
which come to mind in thinking of the Boston writers. 
Yet the very length of his life (1791-1871) and its 



232 



BOSTON 




The Ticknor House, 1903; Corner of Beacon and Park streets. 

constant identification with learning and with people, 
render him a typical figure. It is not chiefly as the 
predecessor of Longfellow in the Smith professorship 
at Harvard or as the accomplished historian of Spanish 
literature that this figure presents itself. We think of 
him rather as the master of the hospitable mansion at 
the head of Park Street, now given over to a score of 
trades and arts. Here, overlooking the Common, 
was his study, rich in the Spanish and Portuguese 
treasures now preserved in the Boston Public Library, 
toward the firm establishment of which he became 
one of the most zealous workers. To the Art Mu- 
seum has descended from the walls of this scholar's 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 



^-33 



library, the portrait of Scott for which at Ticknor's 
request after a visit to Abbotsford Sir Walter sat to 
Leslie. The picture is a tangible expression of that 
familiarity with the most interesting persons and places 
of Europe which was characteristic of Ticknor and his 
immediate circle. His Life abounds in the records of 
friendship with travelling and home-keeping foreigners 
of the first distinction. On reading Ticknor's Memoirs 
Edwin P. Whipple complained that the names of such 
men as Emerson, Whit- 



tier, Theodore Parker, 
and Sumner were notice- 
ably absent from the pages 
of the book. " It was 
not to be supposed," said 
Whipple, " that Mr. 
Ticknor could, as a man 
of eminent respectability, 
have any sympathy with 
their audacities of thought 
and conduct." Even 
Longfellow, Holmes, and 
Lowell do not, in the 
critic's view, receive their 
just share of attention in 
comparison with "some 
titled European medioc- 
rities." Another passage from Whipple's pages on 
Ticknor is suggestive : " His position (after his return 
from Europe in 1838) was so assured that one of his 




House of Charles Sumner, 
Hancock Street. 



234 BOSTON 

friends, Nathan Hale, pleasantly suggested that the 
name of Boston be changed into Ticknorville. In 
New York and other cities the good society of Boston 
was for a long time regarded as the select circle of 
cultivated gentlemen and ladies in which Ticknor 
moved, and to which he almost gave the law." It is 
in the blending of the man of the world, a positive 
social force, and the man of letters, not a mere dilettante 
but an industrious scholar, that Ticknor takes his place 
as a representative figure in the life of Boston. 

To the hand of Ticknor naturally fell the biography 
of his friend and neighbor, William Hickling Prescott. 
It is a book reflecting the same life of "eminent 
respectability." On the westward slope of Beacon 
Street, also overlooking the Common, the house of 
Prescott, a structure of marked dignity and beauty, 
stands to typify, as architecture may, the quality of 
past generations of builders and occupants. From 
Prescott's Life one bears away the impression of some- 
thing more than agreeable surroundings and distin- 
guished achievement. President Walker of Harvard, 
a classmate of Prescott, wrote of him, " I have never 
known one so little changed by the conventionalities 
of society and the hard trial of success and prosperity." 
This is indeed a trial of character. In meeting it and 
at the same time overcoming the handicap of practical 
blindness, Prescott put his inheritances of courage to a 
victorious test. So it is that his Life makes its strong- 
est impression as a record of heroic struggle, a docu- 
ment in evidence of the sterner qualities sometimes 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 



'^35 



transmitted with other gifts of fortune by the fathers 
of New England to their sons. 

If these quahties were characteristic of the class to 
which the Boston writers belonged, so also were the 
inherent qualities of 
the gentleman. Of 
the generous sacri- 
fices of scholarship 
Prescott both re- 
ceived and gave. 
When Irving found 
that the young writer 
was at work on the 
theme which he him- 
self had made ex- 
tensive preparations 
to treat — the Con- 
quest of Mexico — 
he withdrew, and, 
besides leaving the 
field to Prescott, did 
everything possible 
to forward his labor 
in it. The example set by Irving was not wasted upon 
one with instincts like his own. After the failure of 
Motley's venture in fiction, he came to Prescott for 
advice about the work he was planning to do in the 
history of the Dutch Republic. Prescott's studies in 
Spanish history had prepared him for the same task 
which, unknown to Motley, he was about to undertake. 




House of W. H. Prescott (in fore- 
ground), Beacon Street. 



236 BOSTON 

Instead of going on with it, he placed his precious 
library at Motley's disposal, and, but for the dissuading 
voice of Ticknor, would have done the superfluous 
kindness of offering Motley the manuscript collections 
of which he afterward made use in his own Philip the 
Second. Hawthorne's making over of the Acadian 
theme to Longfellow is another of the instances of 
generosity which are useful reminders of what it was 
— and is — to be both a gentleman and an author. 

Of Motley, another favored son of the place, with 
brilliant personal gifts rarely qualifying him for the 
high diplomatic posts he was called to fill ; of Park- 
man, his junior, whose disabilities of eyesight at once 
restricted his intercourse with the world and demanded 
of his own life a strain of heroism as genuine as any 
his pen recorded of others ; of nearly all the company 
of Boston writers, — a detailed account would present 
an inevitable monotony of background. In the matter 
of early influences, Longfellow stood somewhat apart 
from the rest, for Portland and Bowdoin College took 
the more familiar places of Boston and Harvard. But 
then came the period of study and travel in Europe, 
for which Everett and Bancroft had set an example 
increasingly followed, — and after that Longfellow, 
though living in Cambridge, became, especially when 
his second marriage allied him closely to Boston so- 
ciety, an habitual figure therein. His journals tell the 
story of this constant intercourse with the best repre- 
sentatives of fashionable life in the little Boston world, 
at dinners, at Nahant, — to which his witty brother-in- 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 237 

law, T. G. Appleton, gave the enduring name of " cold 
roast Boston," — even at the dancing assemblies in 
the hall of the Papantis, deserted only in recent years 
by the arbiters of local fashion. In his own historic 
house at Cambridge he enjoyed to the full the pleas- 
ures of hospitality ; and the frequent entries of the 
names of guests, native and foreign, produce a pano- 
rama of uncommon variety and interest. The benig- 
nant light which Longfellow's personality threw upon 
all his surroundings is reflected in nearly everything 
that has been written about him. The personality 
and the work he did are so in harmony that W. J. 
Stillman's definition of his nature, as " the most ex- 
quisitely refined and gentle " he ever knew, brings 
to mind the double picture of the man and his writings 
— characteristic, the one and the other, of "the 
' World ' of there and then." 

Of all the group of Boston writers Oliver Wendell 
Holmes stands obviously possessed of the strongest 
local flavor. The manifestations of it in his prose and 
verse are too many and too familiar to require any 
fresh recital. The reader who needs reminding may 
well turn, for a single significant instance, to the char- 
acter of " Little Boston " in The Professor at the Break- 
fast Table. His thoughts and words could have been 
put on paper only by one who was saturated with the 
local spirit and traditions. It is good to hear the 
crooked little man glorying in his birthplace — "full 
of crooked little streets ; but I tell you Boston has 
opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead 



238 BOSTON 

straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds 
than any other city of live men or dead men, — I 
don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high 
their steeples ! " The sense of humor which gave this 
character of " Little Boston " its full measure of eccen- 
tricity was the sense which generally saved Dr. Holmes 
in his proper person from letting himself confuse the 
local and the universal. " We have been in danger," 
he wrote in 1876, "of thinking our local scale was the 
absolute one of excellence — forgetting that 212 Fah- 
renheit is but 100 Centigrade." Of course he did not 
always escape this danger himself. His biographer, 
Mr. J. T. Morse, Jr., is of the opinion that if Dr. 
Holmes had travelled more, the famous Saturday Club, 
which embodied the best masculine society of the 
place, " would have assumed proportions more accu- 
rately adapted to the universe in general." But all 
such contentions are capable of argument. Dr. Holmes 
himself maintained that "identification with a locality 
is a surer passport to immortality than cosmopolitanism 
is." His own case seems indeed to justify this belief. 
In the very point at which the spirit of his writing 
reflected with special clearness the spirit of his com- 
munity, he at once incurred the strongest displeasure 
of some of his contemporaries, and produced his most 
important results in American thought. " The Pro- 
fessor," putting into popular form much of the local 
spirit of liberal theology, must be counted amongst the 
emancipating agencies of the nineteenth century. The 
depolarization of words has become both a phrase and 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 239 

a fact by reason of this book. Its successive instal- 
ments, as they appeared in The Atlantic Monthly^ 
brought down upon the magazine and its chief con- 
tributor charges of extreme and dangerous radicaHsm. 
" If one could believe many of the newspapers," Mr. 
Scudder has said, " Dr. Holmes was a sort of reincar- 
nation of Voltaire, who stood for the most audacious 
enemy of Christianity in modern times." Yet Dr. 
Holmes, the chapel-going descendant of the " meeting- 
going animals " who, according to John Adams, had 
populated New England, had little in common with 
the " come-outers." The local honors of class and 
Phi Beta Kappa poet, Harvard professor, physician at 
the Massachusetts General Hospital, meant much to 
him. It even gratified a local whimsical pride to re- 
flect, after the great fire of 1872, that in the "Great 
Fire" of 1760 his great-grandfather had lost forty build- 
ings. There is significance, too, in noticing how much 
completer a sympathy he brought to his biography of 
Motley than to that of Emerson. For all his appre- 
ciation of Emerson's unique greatness, the well-ordered 
scholarship and career of the historian must have typi- 
fied more clearly to him what one of his own Bostoni- 
ans should be and do. The enlightened conservatism 
in him spoke nowhere more characteristically than 
when he wrote, " I go politically for equality, — I 
said, — and socially for the quality," a sentiment to 
which many of his fellows would have subscribed. 

To his place among the New England classics 
Lowell came by somewhat different paths from those 



240 BOSTON 

of Longfellow and Holmes. Besides being a man of 
letters and a man of the same world to which his dis- 
tinguished contemporaries belonged, he had formed 
early and dubious alliances with the antislavery agita- 
tors. His own magazine, The Pioneer^ opening with 
his plea for a natural rather than a national literature, 
was a closed book after three numbers. For many 
years thereafter his editorial labors identified him 
closely, through The Pennsylvania Freeman and The 
Antislavery Standard, with the opponents of existing 
conditions. The scholar who is not primarily a poet 
may usually be found in the ranks of the cautious and 
contented. The poet, the idealist, in Lowell's nature 
made him inevitably also something of a reformer. It 
was not till Longfellow tired of academic duties in 1854 
that Lowell assumed any such definite connection with 
the established order of things as a Harvard professor- 
ship implied. His completed fame derives so much 
from his work as an essayist and student of literature 
that there is danger of forgetting the unstinted service 
of his early muse in the cause of reform, a cause which 
could not at first be either conventional or popular. The 
figure of Lowell is, however, in this very aspect, char- 
acteristic and important, for he represented one of the 
most vital forces which in the final blending rendered 
the highest literary expression of Boston in the nine- 
teenth century precisely what it was. 

The year 1857 is a convenient date by which to 
mark the blending of elements resulting in this expres- 
sion. In that year The Atlantic Monthly was founded. 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 241 

The story of its origin, due in large measure to the 
enthusiasm of Francis H. Underwood, representing the 
pubHshing house of Phillips, Sampson & Co., has been 
frequently told in recent years. The magazine was 
rarely fortunate in having Lowell for its first editor. 
His sympathies, personal, intellectual, political, had 
perhaps a broader national scope than those of any 
other man to whom this task might have fallen. He 
could therefore better give and receive what would 
have been impossible to one of somewhat parochial 
limitations. Yet it was from the writers of the imme- 
diate vicinity that the magazine won its early distinc- 
tion. The editor had but to stretch out his hand to 
seize an embarrassment of riches. In the twenty-five 
years of interruption between the Autocrat's early 
appearance in the short-lived New England Magazine 
and the resumption of his talk in The Atlantic, Dr. 
Holmes had been storing his treasures of fancy and 
wisdom, and ripening the skill with which he finally 
brought them forth. Emerson and those who were 
most affected by his influence stood ready to provide 
the mellowed best results of Transcendental thought. 
Lowell himself, Edmund Quincy, Whittier, and others 
brought a fine element of fervor for the antislavery 
cause which still had its ultimate victories to win. In 
the field of criticism Edwin Percy Whipple, lecturer 
and writer, whose vanished authority and vogue are 
pathetic emblems of the value of contemporary fame, 
contributed with others the best obtainable comment 
and opinion. Apart from their individual interests, 



242 BOSTON 

it is obvious that most of the writers — let us add 
Longfellow, and Hawthorne, soon to return from 
Europe — could be relied upon for definite additions 
to literature itself. Thus more or less directly from 
the spiritual cause of Transcendentalism, from the 
politico-moral cause of antislavery, from the intellec- 
tual and artistic interest of purely creative writing — 
each represented by spirits and sometimes by minds 
of the first order — there came a union of strangely 
powerful forces. It was the function of llie Atlantic 
to provide a full and free opportunity for the expres- 
sion of these forces. The more thoughtful element, 
not only in Boston but in the country at large, was 
ready for just this influence — all the more perhaps 
because the system of lyceum lectures had not yet 
gone into decay. The frequent lecturing tours of the 
Boston leaders of thought and reform had made their 
personalities familiar throughout New England and 
many Southern and Western states. To find them 
assembled in the pages of The Atlantic was, for a large 
audience, like a reunion of honored friends. 

In its second editor, James T. Fields, The Atlantic 
was also fortunate. Within a little more than two 
years of its founding, the magazine fell into the hands 
of the firm of which he was then a member. Begin- 
ning as a bookseller's clerk who astonished his fellow- 
salesmen at the " Old Corner " by whispering a correct 
prophecy of what each customer entering the shop 
would demand, he had become a publisher well skilled 
in gauging the public taste. At the same time he was 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 243 

sufficiently a maker of books by his own pen to meet 
his writers on even a broader common ground than his 
unusual gifts of friendship could alone have provided. 
It was impossible that a man with so many decisions 
to render should make nothing but friends ; and there 
is at least one volume, by a vigorous feminine writer, 
which will reproduce for those who seek it the note of 
discord in the harmonies of the time and place. For 
the far more general feeling, Dr. Holmes, soon after 
the death of Mr. Fields, in 1881, spoke in words which 
amply suggest the influence an editor and publisher 
may wield : " How many writers know, as I have 
known, his value as a literary counsellor and friend ! 
His mind was as hospitable as his roof, which has 
accepted famous visitors and quiet friends alike as if it 
had been their own. . . . Very rarely, if ever, has a 
publisher enjoyed the confidence and friendship of so 
wide and various a circle of authors," 

From all the record of this " harvest-time " of letters, 
one carries away a vivid impression of a happy family. 
Its members rejoiced like brothers in the successes 
won by each in turn. Working apart, yet side by side, 
they met like brothers for relaxation and play. The 
project of The Atlantic itself was at once launched and 
lunched into being, for it was round a table at Parker's 
that the plan for the new magazine first took definite 
form. It was the habit of the most important early 
contributors to meet frequently in the same informal 
way. But the "Atlantic Club" was soon over- 
shadowed by the more conspicuous and comprehensive 



244 BOSTON 

"Saturday Club," also begun in 1857. This monthly 
gathering at Parker's, which had as its nucleus Emer- 
son and a few friends who made a practice of meeting 
him at the midday dinner-table when he came in from 
Concord, appears and reappears, always with an affec- 
tionate mention, in the journals and letters of the 
time. Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Haw- 
thorne, Whittier, Agassiz, Motley, Fields, Dana, — 
in whose Life, by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the 
best account of the club is to be found, — these, with 
a few others not in general so closely related to lit- 
erature, made up the membership. Distinguished 
visitors were entertained, without the sensation of 
lions on exhibition. The intercourse of friendship 
and good talk received no check from the reading of 
papers. Dr. Holmes rejoiced in the blessed freedom 
from speechmaking. It is told of Emerson that " in 
1864, when the club held a Shakespearian anniversary 
meeting, he rose to speak, stood for a minute or two, 
and then quietly sat down. Speech did not come, and 
he serenely permitted silence to speak for him." This 
incident may be more characteristic of Emerson than 
of his club; yet it reveals a perfect understanding and 
fellowship which help one to accept all that is said of 
the separate place this formless organization held in the 
hearts and lives of its members. Another club of Emer- 
son's, deriving its name from the Unitarian periodical 
of which it was the outgrowth, though now containing 
representatives of the Roman Catholic and Episcopal 
churches, was the " Examiner Club." " The easy 









^^. 




















^. f, ^^2^ ; 

















Diagram ok a Saturday Club Dinner, in the handwriting ue 
John S. Dwight. 



246 BOSTON 

talk of such men as Emerson, the elder Henry James, 
Governor Andrew, Dr, Hedge, Whipple, and others 
of distinguished ability," is said by one of its older 
members to have " touched the higher possibilities of 
conversation when the art was more in evidence than at 
present." In the Saturday Club at its best those possibili- 
ties may well have been even more frequently attained. 
It was entirely natural for such a body of men to 
win from outsiders the name of " The Mutual Admi- 
ration Society." If no mutual admiration existed, it 
was, as Dr. Holmes declared, "a great pity, and 
implied a defect in the nature of men who were other- 
wise largely endowed." Elsewhere he wrote : " I 
don't know whether our literary or professional people 
are more amiable than they are in other places, but 
certainly quarrelling is out of fashion among them. 
This could never be, if they were in the habit of secret 
anonymous puffing of each other. That is the kind 
of underground machinery which manufactures false 
reputations and genuine hatreds. On the other hand, 
I should like to know if we are not at liberty to 
have a good time together, and say the pleasantest 
things we can think of to each other, when any of us 
reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth 
birthday." Here in all sincerity speaks the member 
of that happy family of which the Saturday Club was 
the accepted meeting-place. The Atlantic the recognized 
organ, and the considerable contribution of these 
Boston writers of the nineteenth century to American 
literature the permanent memorial. 



THE "LITERARY CENTRE" 247 

It was not until the year 1894 that the death of Dr. 
Holmes bore away the latest survivor of this group 
of contemporary friends. Lowell and Whittier had 
also seen the beginning of the last decade of the cen- 
tury. In the next to the last Emerson and Long- 
fellow had gone — following Motley in 1877 and 
Hawthorne in 1864. With the eighties the group 
may be said to have been disintegrated. A few of 
their younger brothers, such as Dr. Hale, Professor 
Norton, and Colonel Higginson, have remained to 
typify the older to the younger generation. In them, 
as in many of those who will be their successors, abides 
the old-time quality of representing the best social and 
academic traditions of the place. With the gradual 
passing of the older brotherhood, Boston unquestion- 
ably lost its preeminence as the " literarv centre " of 
the country. Where this wandering spot has fixed 
itself, or where it may be found ten years hence, one 
may not assert too confidently. There is one point, 
however, at which the student of local conditions rests 
with some assurance. The best expression of Boston 
thought and life in literature has never come from a 
class set apart as writers. There has been — so far 
as the best writing is concerned — no restricted " lit- 
erary set," despising and despised of its neighbors. 
Authorship has never been so general as to require 
the adoption of the formula said by the scornful to be 
used in Cambridge as the best of morning greetings — 
" How is your book coming on ? " Yet the emphasis 
laid upon the backgrounds of such lives as Prescott's 






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(iiil ;i i .oM'I'jii. 



IX 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 




W 



HEN Lafayette visited 
Boston in 1 824 and was 
welcomed by a great multitude, 
he turned to Josiah Ouincy, 
mayor of the city, and asked, 
" But where is the mob ? " In- 
deed there was nothing more 
mob-like to show than the 
Lock and Key of levekett crowds which suggested to the 
STREET JAIL, 1835. ^jsi^or "a picked population 

out of the whole human race." From many accounts 
of the "mob" which nearly killed William Lloyd 
Garrison in the streets of Boston eleven years later, we 
are led to suppose that it had the same blameless ap- 
pearance. " This mob," says Henry Wilson, " came 
not from the purlieus of Fort Hill and Ann Street, 
but from the counting-rooms of State Street and the 
parlors of Beacon Street." It is this topographical 
fact which renders the mere existence of a statue of 
Garrison at the very centre of the later social life of 
Boston the significant thing it is. For a more striking 
emblem of the changes wrought within the lifetime of 
the arch-abolitionist, one would look in vain. From 
the men of 1835 ^'^ living body was narrowly rescued. 

250 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 251 

Now for nearly twenty years the grandchildren and 
great-grandchildren of these very men have used the 
reformer's effigy as a nucleus for their laughing games. 
Such changes do not come without struggle and resist- 




WiLLiAM Li.oYD Garrison, Commonwealth Avenue. 
Bronze by Olin L. Warner. 

ance. The story of them is but another of the local 
records with a meaning that is fairly national. 

The " Garrison mob " of 1835 may be taken as the 
first action of concrete warfare between the hostile 
camps which Garrison, more than any other single man, 
had already arrayed against each other — the camps of 
abolition and of laissez-faire. Let us see exactly what 



252 BOSTON 

his Liberator, of which the first number was pubhshed 
in Boston, January i, 1831, proposed to do. It is all a 
tale that has been told again and again. All the more, 
perhaps, we need to remind ourselves of its essential 
points. The very word Liberator^ then, meant pre- 
cisely what it saido Garrison set the simple definition 
of slavery as " the holding of a human being as prop- 
erty " clearly before him, uncompromisingly felt the 
wrong in such an institution, and devoted his life to 
the cause of "immediate emancipation" — a phrase to 
which he attached quite as literal a meaning as the 
word Liberator conveyed to his mind. In the first 
number of his paper he made a salutatory address 
which so accurately gives the spirit in which his work 
was undertaken that it cannot escape frequent quota- 
tion : " I am aware that many object to the severity of 
my language ; but is there not cause for severity .^ I 
will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as 
justice. On the subject of slavery I do not wish to 
think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No ! no ! 
Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate 
alarm ; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the 
hands of the ravisher ; tell the mother to gradually 
extricate her babe from the fire into which it has 
fallen, — but urge me not to use moderation in a 
cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not 
equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a 
single inch — and I will be heard.'' A native of Essex, 
with a brief experience of Baltimore and the South, 
the prophet of twenty-six spoke with all a prophet's 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 253 







®ut Counter is tfje WLoiXM, our CauntrgmER sic all iiHankinll. 



Final Heading of Uberator. 

fervid conviction. He had deliberately chosen Boston 
as the place for the utterance of The Liberator s mes- 
sage because he felt that Richmond or Charleston 
stood scarcely more in need of it. He assumed and 
held his tone of vehement aggression with a full con- 
sciousness of what he was about. When a friend in 
private, urging him to keep more cool, said, " Why, 
you are all on fire," Garrison's confident reply came, 
" I have need to be all on Jire, for I have mountains 
of ice about me to melt." He knew the Boston 
which surrounded him. 

A year after the beginning of The Liberator^ the 
New England Antislavery Society, the first American 
organization of its kind, was established in Boston. 
Here, in its simplest form, was another of the agencies 
by which the ice was to be melted. The meeting at 
which the constitution of the society was adopted was 
held on the night of a bitter snowstorm, in the school- 
room under a negro church. The instrument had 
twelve signers, one of whom, Oliver Johnson, has left 



254 



BOSTON 



the record of his belief that " there were not more 
than one or two who could have put a hundred 
dollars into the treasury without bankrupting them- 
selves." The whole enterprise would have seemed to 
a student of human chances as impossible as it was 
obscure. We have seen the spirit in which Garrison 
began the work of his Liberator. It will be equally 
well to know exactly what the first organized aboli- 
tionists set before themselves as their ideal and their 
task. This is presented in the preamble to their con- 
stitution, modified a year later, but clearly setting 
forth the chief articles of the. primitive abolitionist 
faith : " We, the undersigned, hold that every per- 
son, of full age and sane mind, has a right to imme- 
diate freedom from personal bondage of whatsoever 
kind, unless imposed by the sentence of law for the 
commission of some crime. We hold that man can- 
not, consistently with reason, religion, and the eternal 
and immutable principles of justice, be the property 
of man. We hold that whoever retains his fellow- 
man in bondage is guilty of a grievous wrong. 
We hold that mere difference of complexion is no 
reason why any man should be deprived of any of 
his natural rights, or subjected to any political disa- 
bility. While we advance these opinions as the 
principles on which we intend to act, we declare that 
we will not operate in the existing relations of society 
by other than peaceful and lawful means, and that 
we will give no countenance to violence or insur- 
rection." 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 255 

Here, in spite of the pacific flavor of the last sentence, 
were sentiments to which neither North nor South 
could turn a heedless ear. To the South, Garrison, 
naturally enough, typified the new agitation ; and the 
following editorial expression represented the calmer 
Southern view : " We know nothing of the man ; we 
desire not to have him unlawfully dealt with ; we can 
even conceive of his motive being good in his own 
opinion : but it is the motive of the man who cuts the 
throats of your wife and children." Of a Northern 
attitude that was largely typical, and of the abolitionist 
manner of meeting it, a single concrete instance, taken 
from the " Recollections " of the Rev. S. J. May, is 
more illustrative than pages of generalization could 
be. Mr. May, an ardent fellow-worker with Garrison, 
was speaking at a New York antislavery meeting in 
1835, and saw a man enter whom he recognized as a 
partner in one of the chief mercantile firms of the city. 
He beckoned Mr. May to the door, and when they 
stood together on the sidewalk, said : — 

"'Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know 
that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But it was 
consented to by the founders of our Republic. It was 
provided for in the Constitution of our Union. A great 
portion of the property of the Southerners is invested 
under its sanction ; and the business of the North, as 
well as the South, has become adjusted to it. There 
are millions upon millions of dollars due from South- 
erners to the merchants and mechanics of this city 
alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized 



256 BOSTON 

by any rupture between North and South. We cannot 
afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed in 
your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a 
matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business 
necessity. We cannot afford to let you succeed. We 
mean, sir,' said he, with increased emphasis, — 'we 
mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down, — by fair 
means if we can, by foul means if we must.' 

" After a minute's pause I replied : ' Then, sir, the 
gain of gold must be better than that of godliness. 
Error must be mightier than truth ; wrong stronger 
than right. The Devil must preside over the affairs 
of the universe, and not God. Now, sir, I believe 
neither of these propositions. If holding men in 
slavery be wrong, it will be abolished. We shall 
succeed, your pecuniary interest to the contrary not- 
withstanding.' " 

Borrowed from New York, this dialogue has no 
peculiar local flavor. It is characteristic merely of the 
North, and is cited here at length, with the Garrison 
utterance and the abolitionist preamble, in order to 
suggest yet another important element in the bewilder- 
ing case that had to be argued, through deed and word, 
in every American city. In addition to what all the 
North had in common, the slavery question in Boston 
had local flavor enough and to spare. To Garrison 
and his comrades the place owed its distinction of being 
the headquarters of agitation. Through the " good 
principle of rebellion " constantly at work in Boston, 
Garrison never wanted supporters who refused with 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 257 

him to accept the conditions accepted by others. In 
the conservative forces, on the other hand, no less 
than in the radical, Boston had its own characteristics. 
If the unchecked stalking of respectability told upon 
letters, its eftect upon the social and political order was 
even more pronounced. The growth of the cotton 
manufacturing industry in Massachusetts brought the 
powerful commercial class of Boston into close relations 
with the powerful cotton-raising, slave-owning class at 
the South. Southern planters coming to the Boston 
hotels, as to those of a summer resort, received abun- 
dant hospitality at the best private houses. Their 
sons at Harvard, with large allowances and engaging 
manners, formed Northern friendships which forbade 
the chosen youth of New England to regard all slave- 
holders with aversion. It was rather the reformer, 
the abolitionist, himself outside the social pale and 
hostile to existing institutions, who needed to be 
aboHshed. The people of Boston, says the biographer 
of Sumner, " had a keen sense of legality, sharpened 
at times by material interests." Nearly every influ- 
ence persuaded the average citizen to the letting of 
well enough alone. 

Among the strongest of those conservative forces 
were, of course, the clergy. Throughout the North 
the abolitionists were confronted from the first by the 
clerical influences, which lent all their strength to the 
Colonization Society and its somewhat Utopian plan 
of carrying blacks to Africa. It may be, as Mr. May 
declared, — in defence of his cloth, — that a greater 



258 BOSTON 

proportion of clergymen than of either of the other 
"learned professions" embraced the cause of "imme- 
diate emancipation." Certainly as the conflict went on, 
this cause was palpably the stronger for the help espe- 
cially of Unitarian ministers in New England. But 
in the earlier stages the churches in general, and the 
Boston Unitarian leaders in particular, could see little 
or nothing to commend in the purposes and methods 
of the Garrisonians. There were, of course, many who 
drew a clear line of distinction between " antislavery " 
and "abolition." Like the New York merchant, they 
saw the wrong and evil of slavery ; they were ready 
to do even more than he toward making things better 
— but not according to the abolitionist programme. 
Their sentiments found expression in these words 
of Dr. Gannett's : " The general strain of language of 
the abolitionists toward, — not only slaveholders, of 
whom I mean not now to say anything, — but toward 
Northern men who do not agree with them, is, I 
think, unchristian, bitterly and fiercely unchristian. 
With a party which glories in such a course I can- 
not strike hands. I may sympathize in their objects, 
while I dread and abhor their spirit." To such com- 
ment the more heated advocates of abolition made 
their retort by calling the clergy the " brotherhood of 
Thieves." 

Indeed, why should not the typical Boston Unita- 
rian, minister or layman, have dreaded and abhorred 
the abolitionist spirit ? The prevailing habit of 
thought and feeling was to dwell so lovingly on the 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 259 

good qualities of human nature that tragedy and evil 
came to look almost as remote as in daily experience 
they were. Dr. Frothingham has told the story of a 
Boston clergyman whose subscription was asked for a 
charity on behalf of prisoners ; he took out his pocket- 
book, saying, " I will give you something, for evidently 
you need it, but I have no faith in your cause ; my 
preference is for people who don't get into jail." Of 
Dr. Walker, the distinguished Unitarian minister who 
became president of Harvard College, Dr. Frothing- 
ham's book preserves the report that he would not 
even vote — " lest he should be associated in the public 
mind with political opinions. He was a clergyman, 
and as such pledged to the single duty of educating 
people in character." Nor did the influence, accord- 
ing to Dr. Frothingham, flow all in one direction — 
from the pulpit to the pews. The fact that the Uni- 
tarian congregations contained the chief men of affairs 
and of thought, merchants, politicians, judges, the 
dignified figures representing stability and order, could 
not but have its effect. The ministers would have 
been something more than human if, in the august 
presences of Webster, Everett, Ticknor, Prescott, and 
the rest, tjiey had proclaimed the opinions of these 
men on one point of public order to be utterly at fault, 
and the voice of the people, for whom the abolitionists 
came more and more to speak, to be the true voice of 
God. It is easy to see, therefore, why by the summer 
of 1835, when The Liberator had been fulminating 
against the forces of respectability for four years, and 



26o BOSTON 

antislavery meetings had steadily increased in frequency 
and violence of speech, there were fifteen hundred citi- 
zens of Boston ready to sign a call for a public meet- 
ing in Faneuil Hall to denounce the agitators of the 
slavery question for endangering the Union itself 
The mayor of the city, Theodore Lyman, Jr., presided 
at the meeting ; Abbott Lawrence was one of its vice- 
presidents, and Harrison Gray Otis a speaker. The 
abolitionists were roundly denounced ; and a few days 
later The Liberator placed the blame for whatever 
trouble might spring from such unrestrained speeches 
squarely on the shoulders of the distinguished speakers. 
The premonition of trouble was correct. 

The day of the "Garrison mob" — to call the riot 
by its historic name — has left one of the darkest spots 
in the whole calendar of Boston history. It was not 
entirely the sporadic thing one would naturally think 
it. Only the summer before (August ii, 1834), a 
mob, stirred up by a false report that a young woman 
was restrained against her will in the Ursuline Con- 
vent at Charlestown, attacked that institution, pillaged 
its property, and destroyed the building by fire. This 
cowardly attack upon unprotected women and girls 
had the poor excuse that it proceeded from fellows of 
the baser sort, excited by the powerful stimulant of 
religious prejudice. The Garrison mob had no such 
excuse. In practically every account of it, beginning 
with that of Garrison himself, the rioters have been 
described as " gentlemen of property and standing." 
Only a year earlier Channing had deplored the com- 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION :l6i, 

mon remark, " These mobs are bad, but they will put 
down antislavery." This was the remark of respect- 
able lookers-on. In the Boston mob of October 21, 
1835, these spectators took the part of the chief actors. 
For this day the Boston Female Antislavery Society 
had advertised a meeting at 46, Washington Street, the 
building which contained The Liberator office. It was 
supposed, outside the antislavery ranks, that George 
Thompson, the eminent English abolitionist, whose 
very presence in America was bitterly resented, would 
take part in the meeting. As a matter of fact he was 
not expected to speak, and was not even in Boston at 
the time. Yet the placards, calling upon the " friends 
of the Union " to bring him to the tar-kettle before 
dark, had the effect of collecting a great crowd about 
the antislavery headquarters before the hour of the 
meeting. Thus all but about thirty women were pre- 
vented from entering the hall. These, in spite of 
interruptions from the crowd, were proceeding with 
their meeting when Mayor Lyman appeared on the 
scene and, pleading that he could not insure their 
safety, induced them to go home. They made 
their way through the crowd, which by this time had 
learned that Garrison was in his office. Shouting 
was heard : " We must have Garrison ! Out with him. 
Lynch him ! " The mayor, seeing how slender was 
the chance of holding the mob in check, advised Gar- 
rison to escape from the rear of the building. This he 
attempted to do, but his progress led him only into a car- 
penter's shop behind the Washington Street building. 



264 BOSTON 

where he was seized. Some of his captors were for 
throwing him out of a window. The opposite counsel, 
to put a rope round his body and have him descend 
by a ladder, prevailed. Thus he was paid out into the 
very arms of the mob. Here his clothes — a new suit 
which he frugally lamented — were torn from his body, 
and worse things would have befallen him but for a 
few lovers of fair play, who shouted, " He shan't be 
hurt! He is an American!" and, forming a small 
bodyguard, succeeded in getting him inside the doors 
of the City Hall — the Old State House. " Through- 
out the whole of this trying scene," he afterward said, 
" I felt perfectly calm, nay, very happy. It seemed to 
me that it was indeed a blessed privilege thus to suffer 
in the cause of Christ. Death did not present one 
repulsive feature. The promises of God sustained 
my soul, so that it was not only divested of fear, but 
ready to sing aloud for joy." From the City Hall 
the mayor managed to smuggle Garrison into a hack. 
Again the mob recognized him, and the circuitous 
drive to Leverett Street jail, whither he was sent for 
safety, was accomplished through further tumult and 
peril. His haven of refuge, the cell, was shared, as he 
said, with "two delightful associates — a good con- 
science and a cheerful mind." Friends came to visit 
him in the evening, and the night was passed in tran- 
quil sleep. Altogether the honors of the day belonged 
to this defeated abolitionist, and to the women whose 
retreat became a victory. 

It should be noted that the immediate occasion of 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION iGs 

the Garrison mob was a meeting of women. Through 
this circumstance the women take their place early and 
prominently, as they should, on the abolitionist stage. 
Dissensions over this very prominence were soon to 
rend the antislavery ranks. The more radical advo- 
cates of immediate emancipation were ready to see the 
women of the white race liberated from the conven- 
tions of silence and restraint. Within the ranks of 
reform there were those who sympathized with the 
feeling of the people at large, that the public appear- 
ance of women ran counter to the very order and 
decency of the Christian church. But the two eman- 
cipations went hand in hand. When the earlier cause 
was won, many of its champions continued their work 
in the cause of woman suffrage. The " strong-minded 
woman," who is regarded as a peculiar product of 
Boston, had her origin, then, under provocations more 
compelling than those of recent years. To the women 
of the North the condition of women under slavery 
made a potent appeal. It was an appeal to which 
they could respond with warmer hearts because no 
question of their own " rights " was involved. In 
Boston their response was of the greatest practical 
value to the antislavery leaders. Whether they spoke 
or merely sat upon the platform, their presence at 
public meetings, often stormy, brought encouragement 
and strength. We can look with true admiration on 
the picture, drawn by Mrs. Howe in \\qy Reminiscences, 
of Maria Weston Chapman and Lydia Maria Child 
walking calmly on each side of Wendell Phillips as he 



266 



BOSTON 



came out from an evening meeting into the street 
where the crowd of waiting roughs had promised him 
a violent reception. The crowd looked quietly on 
as the speaker and his escort w^ent their way. We 

can look with amusement 
on another picture, set- 
ting forth the embarrass- 
ment caused by a woman 
of more zeal than discre- 
tion. It became neces- 
sary on one occasion to 
remove from an anti- 
slavery meeting in Marl- 
boro Chapel a woman 
whose monomania for free 
speech caused frequent 
trouble. Oliver Johnson 
and two others placed her 
gently in a chair and car- 
ried her down the aisle. 
" I'm better off than my Master was," she exclaimed ; 
" He had but one ass to ride — I have three to 
carry me." But there were other occasions than such 
public meetings for the women to save or to mar. 
The chief of these was the annual Antislavery Fair, 
held first in 1834. Beginning modestly, this grew to 
be an institution of considerable proportions, and for 
some years was held in Faneuil Hall. Subscriptions 
to the Antislavery Standard were received, and for 
fifteen years the successive editions of The Liberty Bell 




LvDiA Maria Child. 

Photograph in possession of 
F. J. Garrison, Esq. 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 267 

were on sale. For this annual, constructed in the 
prevailing mode of its period, Mrs. Chapman secured 
contributions from the foremost writers of America 
and England whose pens yielded anything to the anti- 
slavery cause. This was a company, with Whittier 
and Lowell at its head, which gave the annual a per- 
manent interest and value. From the fairs in general, 
the cause derived, not only financial benefit, but also 
the strength which comes from joining an enterprise 
in the public mind with the disinterested work of good 
women. 

To this feminine support must be added even a 
stronger influence — the working of the Anglo-Saxon 
spirit of fair play. The cause of antislavery certainly 
owed much to its opponents. When the weaker party 
to any contention becomes a victim to browbeating 
and insult, it does not take long for latent sympathy 
to grow into active partisanship. The case of Dr. 
Henry Ingersoll Bowditch is typical. He sees the 
Garrison mob, and immediately resolves, " I am an 
abolitionist from this very moment, and to-morrow 
I will subscribe for Garrison's Liberator^ In the 
following year, 1836, new strength was gained through 
the treatment accorded the abolitionists by a committee 
of the Massachusetts legislature. Governor Everett in 
his annual address had encouraged action upon the de- 
mand of several Southern states for the suppression of 
the abolitionists. To the committee appointed to con- 
sider the matter came the abolitionists to argue against 
such action. One of them ventured to allude to the 



268 BOSTON 

Garrison mob as the result of the Faneuil Hall meet- 
ing of conservatives, and was promptly ruled out of 
order. Thus at every turn the abolitionists felt them- 
selves unfairly treated ; and many of the spectators 
agreed with them. Here it was that Channing, whose 
recent pamphlet on slavery had by no means satisfied 
the Garrisonians, was seen shaking hands with Garri- 
son. " Righteousness and peace have kissed each 
other," whispered Mrs. Chapman to her neighbor, 
little thinking that Channing would subsequently spoil 
her mot by saying that he did not know at the time 
who Garrison was. Nevertheless the powerful influ- 
ence of Channing, hitherto out of sympathy with 
abolitionist methods, lent itself more and more from 
this time forth to the general cause of antislavery. 
Possibly the words of Samuel J. May, protesting with 
him for his early disapproval of the Garrisonians, con- 
tinued to ring in his ears : " We abolitionists," said 
May, " are what we are — babes, sucklings, obscure 
men, silly women, publicans, sinners, and we shall 
manage this matter just as might be expected of such 
persons as we are. It is unbecoming abler men who 
stood by and would do nothing to complain ot us, 
because we do no better." It is evident, however, 
that the pews to which Channing preached did not 
immediately follow him. On a Sunday soon after the 
meeting of Garrison and Channing at the State House, 
Mrs. Chapman, at Garrison's wish, took him to hear 
Channing preach. They sat in a pew, the use of 
which had been offered by the owner to Mrs. Chap- 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 269 



man and her family. From this owner Mrs. Chapman 
received a note on the next day putting an end to her 
privilege. If she could bring Garrison with her, 
whom might she not bring next ? During Garrison's 
visit to England he had 
received what seemed 
to him a great compli- 
ment, in that certain 
persons invited to meet 
him expected to see a 
negro. That he was 
treated like one in Bos- 
ton we are reminded 
by what did happen to 
a negro at the Park 
Street Church. It is 
told that in the course 
of trading with a white 
man a negro came 
fairly into possession 
of a pew in the central 
aisle of that church. One Sunday he occupied it with 
his family — and one Sunday only; for besides pro- 
voking the inhospitable frowns of the congregation, 
his presence led the trustees to scrutinize his title to 
the pew, with the result that a technicality was found, 
sufficient to dispossess him. It needed only cases 
enough of this kind to win for both negro and aboli- 
tionist an army of friends inspired with the proverbial 
zeal of converts. 




Maria Weston Chapman. 

Daguerreotype in possession of the Boston 

Public Library. 



270 



BOSTON 



The winning of friends was not accomplished by 
local causes only. When a proslavery mob threw an 
antislavery printing outfit into the Ohio or Mississippi, 
the Boston abolitionists gained more than they lost. 
Especially was the feeling in Boston about the killing 
of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy at Alton, Illinois, in 
November of 1837, turned to good account by the 
opponents of slavery. By this time Channing was 
sufficiently identified with their cause to head the list 
of petitioners for the use of Faneuil Hall to denounce 
this murder. The Aldermen denied the petition on 
the ground that a Faneuil Hall meeting was under- 
stood in other places to represent public opinion in 
Boston, and that the resolutions this meeting would 
surely pass would give a false impression. Many were 
indignant that the "cradle of liberty " should be with- 
held from an exercise so obviously of free speech. 
Channing himself issued an address to the people of 
Boston, calling for a reversal of the Aldermen's deci- 
sion. Public sentiment demanded the granting of the 
antislavery petition, and it was granted. 

This Lovejoy meeting is particularly to be noted 
for bringing into prominence two names then new to 
the antislavery cause, but later inseparable from it — 
the names of Quincy and Phillips. The signature of 
Edmund Quincy appeared on the first call for the 
Faneuil Hall meeting. Twenty-nine years old, a son 
of the President of Harvard College who had been 
mayor of Boston, belonging to none of the classes in 
May's catalogue of abolitionists, endowed with un- 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 271 



usual gifts as a writer, he had much to bring to the 
cause. He brought it largely in the form of contribu- 
tions to the antislavery press, standing later by the 
side of his intimate fellow- 
worker, James Russell 
Lowell, amongst the most 
effective and prolific writ- 
ers for the Standard. His 
kinsman, Wendell Phil- 
lips, son of the first, as 
Quincy was of the sec- 
ond, mayor of Boston, 
made his debut upon the 
antislavery stage at the 
Lovejoy meeting itself 
Again an opponent of 
reform blazed the path 
for the new reformer. 
James T. Austin, Attor- 
ney-general of Massa- 
chusetts, declared, in 
antagonism to the anti- 
slavery speakers of the 
occasion, that Lovejoy 
had merely " died as the 
fool dieth," and likened the liberation of slaves to 
the turning loose of all the wild and silly beasts in 
the Boston menagerie. To many of the audience this 
was welcome doctrine, and their tumult for a time 
seemed likely to drown the rejoinder which Wendell 




Wendell Phillips. 



272 BOSTON 

Phillips hastened to make. But the handsome, vehe- 
ment young lawyer would not be stilled ; and this 
maiden speech in the cause to which many years of his 
life were to be given foreshadowed his distinguished 
place amongst American orators. " That speech," 
wrote John Murray Forbes — a power, as will be 
seen, worth winning — "changed my whole feeling 
with regard to it [slavery], though the bigotry and 
pigheadedness of the aboHtionists prevented my acting 
with them." 

Corresponding to the influence exerted on individ- 
uals by violent word and act on behalf of slavery was 
the effect produced upon political and moral thought 
in general by the growth of the slave power in national 
affairs. The Liberator and the abolitionists may well 
have contributed to this growth by exciting the South 
to a more aggressive maintenance of its own institution. 
In 1844 Garrison and his fellow-radicals, non-resistants 
and non-voters from the first, went so far as to advo- 
cate disunion between the free and the slave states. 
The urging of these extreme measures had far less 
influence on the public mind, however, than such 
victories for the slave-power as the annexation of 
Texas and the Mexican war, events which brought 
the North face to face with the problem of extending 
or limiting the system of slavery. The very problem 
helped to bring its own solution, for it drew upon it- 
self just such lights, for example, as Lowell in his 
Biglow Papers hastened to throw upon the questions at 
issue. In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 273 

with the help of Webster's overpowering influence. 
His Seventh of March speech, in which he gave his 
cordial support to the measure, was received in Boston 
with sentiments ranging from those of Whittier's 
Ichabod to the cordial approbation expressed in an 
address of welcome delivered by Benjamin R. Curtis 
in front of the Revere House when Webster came to 
Boston in April. A similar expression of local senti- 
ment was a letter expressing the satisfaction with which 
its eight hundred signers, including Rufus Choate, 
Ticknor, Prescott, Col. T. H. Perkins, President 
Sparks, and others of distinction, viewed the services 
of Webster in bringing " the present crisis in our 
national affairs to a fortunate and peaceful termination." 
It was Ticknor — we may note in passing — who 
wrote two years later to a Canadian friend about Uncle 
Tom s Cabin : " But of one thing you may be sure. It 
will neither benefit the slaves nor advance the slave 
question one iota toward its solution." Between 
Ticknor on the one hand — from whose immediate 
circle such men as Sumner, R. H. Dana, Jr., and 
Dr. Bowditch were ostracized by reason of their anti- 
slavery sentiments — and the extreme Garrisonians on 
the other, there was a wide territory. It was the en- 
forcing of the Fugitive Slave Law which brought the 
people of this region into active antagonism to slavery. 
There was abundant reason for the opponents of 
the Fugitive Slave Law to fear its operations in Boston. 
The law required the return of escaped slaves, no mat- 
ter how long they had been out of bondage. On the 



274 BOSTON 

northern slope of Beacon Hill many of these fugitives 
had been settled long enough to have acquired a sense 
of security. It was to be expected that in the city of 
Garrison and The Liberator the slave-owners would 
take a special pleasure in recovering their human prop- 
erty. At the Faneuil Hall meeting which denounced 
the new law — there was of course another to commend 
it — the Boston negroes were encouraged to stay where 
they were, with the promise that white friends would 
guard them against the fate they feared. This was not 
an easy promise to keep. 

In one of the earliest conspicuous cases under the 
law, the negroes managed their own affair. A black 
man, working under the name of Shadrach in a coffee- 
house in Cornhill, was arrested in February of 1851. 
The jails and officials of Massachusetts being exempt 
under a state law from any dealings with fugitive slaves 
as such, Shadrach was confined in the United States 
Court-room to await his trial before the United States 
Commissioner. From this confinement a mob of 
negroes forcibly rescued him, and sent him rejoicing 
on his way to Canada, where he was soon safe from 
rendition. No such good fortune was In store for 
Thomas Sims, another fugitive arrested in April of 
1 85 1. He too was imprisoned in the Court House, 
which the authorities, fearing another rescue, sur- 
rounded with chains. With him the law took Its 
course. He was evidently a fugitive, yet when his 
owner's case was won, it was thought prudent to have 
Sims leave the Court House at five in the morning. 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 275 

and march, surrounded by three hundred police In 
hollow square, to the vessel which bore him to Savan- 
nah. That day the funeral bells were tolled in Boston. 
Before the last and most important of all the fugitive 
slave cases — that of Anthony Burns in 1854 — events 
had done still more to strengthen the antislavery senti- 
ment. Charles Sumner, a member of the United States 
Senate from December of 1851, stood before the coun- 
try as the embodi- /^ ^ /^ 
ment or somethmg ty^^ «- t-^-^-^M*. »-^ -« — *^ 

in Massachusetts ^fe<l .^f <7vv^7^-^<^ ^ ^^ ^ 

widely different from ,^,^^^^ c^ ^ <; yU.^^ 

that which Webster ^,__ ^ 

represented. Radi- ^-^^ ^t-rPC;^^ ^ 

cal of thought, mer- ^ ^uslJ-c^.^ ci. < r^^ ^<iK^ 

ciless of speech, he / ^n^A^ 

felt behind him the Q ^ * ^ 

moral, rather than CXcv^ yOt^^^t^ 

the social and com- y* ^ 
mercial forces of his ^^^^^n ' ^v^ 
State. Amongst ^ 

thinking persons, in their turn, the principle of resist- 
ance to the constituted authorities, when abstract right 
seemed to require it, was steadily gaining ground. 
Through the effective workings of the Underground 
Railway system, to cite a single example, this principle 
expressed itself in Boston as throughout the North — 
and the law was steadily defied. Not only the rank 
and file, but men of leading and of education found 
themselves in the unaccustomed place of law-breakers. 



276 



BOSTON 



When it was feared that the fugitive Crafts, married by 
Theodore Parker during their stay in Boston, would be 
captured and returned to slavery, Dr. H. I. Bowditch, 
having occasion to drive Craft to Brookline one Sun- 
day, carried a loaded pistol in one hand ready to repel 




Old Court House, Court Square. 

slave-catchers. While the two fugitives had the pro- 
tection of Theodore Parker's house before they were 
sent to England, he wrote his sermons at a desk in 
which a drawn sword and a pistol lay ready for instant 
use. Almost as a part of the marriage ceremony, he 
gave the pair a Bible apiece and a bowie-knife, for de- 
fence of soul and body. These typical instances of the 
antislavery readiness to fight if necessary point to the 
condition which could not but follow the Southern vic- 
tory in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854. 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION , 277 

More than to any other single cause, perhaps, it was 
due to this measure that the "Burns riot" had so 
different a purpose from that of the "Garrison mob," 
and that the rendition of Burns was so much greater a 
tragedy in the view of Boston than the rendition of 
Sims, three years earher. 

On May 24, 1854, Anthony Burns, a recent fugitive 
from slavery, was arrested in Boston. Through the 
mediation of Theodore Parker he was induced to 
accept the legal services of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 
in his defence. His extra-legal defence was immedi- 
ately undertaken by the antislavery " Vigilance Com- 
mittee." A small sub-committee, including Wendell 
Phillips, Theodore Parker, Samuel G. Howe, and 
Thomas W^entworth Higginson, set about devising a 
plan for the rescue of Burns. At the last moment it 
was decided to stampede a public meeting to be held 
in Faneuil Hall on Friday evening. May 26, and direct 
its whole physical force, after its righteous indignation 
was aroused, against the Court House, where Burns 
was confined. In Colonel Higginson's own words, 
" It was one of the very best plots that ever — failed." 
The Faneuil Hall meeting was large, to the point of 
unwieldiness. Mr. Higginson, and a few supporters, 
were ready to lead the attack upon the Court House, 
when the reenforcement of friends should arrive from 
Faneuil Hall. The signal for the stampede was 
imperfectly understood by Phillips, Parker, and Howe, 
and the intended leaders were among the last to reach 
the Court House. There, meanwhile, an official had 



27< 



BOSTON 



locked the main door; and Mr. HIgginson with a few 
others began battering the west door with a joist. 
When it gave way, it admitted the attacking party 
merely into the arms of a band of policemen, who plied 
their clubs with such zeal that further progress was out 
of the question. In the scrimmage a shot was fired 
which killed one of the marshal's deputies. Here 
was the tragic note. Over against it may be set the 
appearance a few moments later of the imperturbable 
Alcott at the stairway guarded by armed deputy mar- 
shals. " Why are we not within .? " asked the sage. 
In the blame which Mr. Higginson's answer laid upon 
those who had failed to render support the failure of 
the whole venture was involved. For all its futility it 
had not failed to demonstrate that scholars, clergymen, 
and philanthropists were ready on occasion to resist the 
slave-power vi el armis, as vigorously as the "gentlemen 
of property and standing" nineteen years before had 
assailed the advocate of emancipation. The wholesale 
reversal of familiar standards was suggested by the com- 
ment on Mr. Higginson in Dana's diary the day after 
the riot : " I knew his ardor and courage, but I hardly 
expected a married man, a clergyman, and a man of 
education to lead the mob." 

On the Monday after the Burns riot, the fugitive's 
trial began. Fearing further trouble the authorities 
had the Court House fairly garrisoned with soldiers 
and police. Dana fervently pleaded the prisoner's 
case, but though technicalities might have set him free, 
he was evidently the claimant's slave, and on June 2 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 279 

the United States Commissioner, Edward G. Loring, 
rendered a verdict in the owner's favor. It is a signifi- 
cant footnote to the history of the time that the women 
of a neighboring town promptly sent Loring thirty 
pieces of silver, of the smallest denomination minted. 
In an antislavery daily paper objection was made 
" even to the addition o^ ninety cents to the legal fee of 
ten dollars which Loring has received for his inhuman 
job." So much of local sympathy went out to the 
surrendered slave that little was left for the official who 
administered the law. If it was difficult to protect 
Burns within the Court House, the problem of getting 
him on board the revenue cutter which should bear him 
away was far more perplexing. The show of force 
was the surest measure of safety. Dr. Bowditch saw 
his removal, and has thus described it : "In full broad 
daylight, in the middle of the day, in front of the 
assembled merchant princes of State Street, with a 
right royal cortege of two companies of United States 
troops, and cannon loaded with grape, and all the mili- 
tary of SuffiDlk County, the poor slave was escorted, as 
with royal splendor, to the end of Long Wharf." But 
the splendor was all in the procession, not in its sur- 
roundings. Shops and offices were closed and draped 
in black. Flags with the union down were hung 
across State Street. Swinging in air near the Old 
State House hung a huge coffin, bearing the legend, 
"The funeral of liberty." Hisses and cries of 
" Shame ! Shame ! " met the procession throughout 
its line of march. A brother of a member of the 



28o BOSTON 

Corps of Cadets, later a distinguished officer in the 
Civil War, tells the story that when this young soldier 
came home at evening, he flung himself down and cried 
like a child for very sorrow at the part his military 
duty had forced him to play in that day's work. The 
sense of defeat and shame was bitter throughout the 
community. Even at the South there were those who 
saw their victory as the British had seen the winning 
of Bunker Hill. "We rejoice at the recapture of 
Burns," wrote a Southern editor, quoted by Mr. J. F. 
Rhodes, "but a few more such victories and the South 
is undone." 

It was not foreseen at the time of the rendition of 
Burns that after him no slave would be sent from 
Boston back to slavery. Accordingly the friends of 
the slave made ready to prevent a repetition of the 
Sims and Burns affairs. Their organization, fully de- 
scribed in the Life of Dr. Bowditch, was called the 
Anti-Man-Hunting League. Its plan was to affiliate 
lodges in Boston and throughout the state with the 
purpose of seizing slave-hunters who would not for a 
consideration give freedom to their fugitives. In the 
event of refusal, the slave-hunter was to be kidnapped 
and sent to one out-of-town lodge after another. In 
the smaller cities and towns of Massachusetts, it should 
be remembered, a more united antislavery feeling was 
generally to be found than in Boston. For the seizure 
of the slave-hunter a definite drill was practised. A 
sturdy member was chosen to represent the enemy, 
and a committee was appointed to kidnap him. Arms, 




Old State House, State Street. 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 283 

legs, and head, were assigned to this, that, and the 
other member. The meetings of the League were in 
effect rehearsals of seizure, in which, despite the 
strength of the muscular corpus vile^ the kidnappers 
acquired great proficiency. The point of significance 
in the record of the League is that the kidnappers 
were not rufiians but men of refinement and orderly 
tradition. 

Of kindred service in the cause of emancipation 
Boston stood ready to give its generous share to 
" bleeding Kansas," after the Kansas-Nebraska Law 
permitted the settlers in these territories to determine 
by their votes whether the two new states should be 
slave or free. The New England Emigrant Aid 
Society was well within the law in smoothing the path 
of emigrants who might be expected to vote against 
slavery. In Bishop Lawrence's Life of his father, 
Amos A. Lawrence, it may be seen how freely money 
and sympathy flowed to Kansas from sources hitherto 
strongly conservative. There is a fine flavor of 
romance, moreover, in the picture of the first party, 
twenty-nine strong, singing as the train rolled out of 
Boston, Whittier's words to the tune of "Auld Lang 
Syne " : — 

" We cross the prairie as of old 

The pilgrims crossed the sea. 
To make the West, as they the East, 

The homestead of the free ! " 

Though private members of the Emigrant Aid 
Society sent rifles to the settlers — some thirteen 



284 BOSTON 

hundred in all — there were frequent injunctions 
against using these arms to resist United States 
authority. The cause of Kansas, however, grew to 
be in the eyes of some of its chief supporters the 
cause of John Brown. The rifles conveyed to him 
under the borrowed name of " hardware " were pro- 
vided by men who did not ask too many questions, 
and later would have joined heartily in John A. 
Andrew's declaration, " Whatever might be thought 
of John Brown's acts, John Brown himself was right." 
Here again, amongst the Boston men who stood 
nearest to Brown, were those who in common times 
would have followed all the paths of peace. When 
war came they were of those who stood nearest to 
Governor Andrew. From the hanging of John 
Brown at the end of 1859 to the outbreak of the 
Civil War, the interval was brief, both in time and 
in the change of spirit which the less timid were 
obliged to undergo. 

It was only four months before the fall of Sumter, 
however, that Tremont Temple was the scene of a 
conservative demonstration almost as violent as the 
" Garrison mob." The anniversary of the death of 
John Brown was chosen as the occasion for a meeting, 
called chiefly by young men, including Mr. F. B. 
Sanborn of Concord, to discuss the question, " How 
can Slavery be abolished ? " The powerful element 
in Boston which even at this eleventh hour believed 
that Slavery should be let alone packed the meeting, 
with malice aforethought. An eye-witness thus de- 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 285 



scribed the intruders : " They looked like the frequent- 
ers of State Street, and of the avenues of wholesale 
trade in cotton goods. They resembled the famous 
mob of 1835, of which I also was a witness." Mr. 
Sanborn, Frederick Douglass, and others who at- 
tempted to speak were shouted down. A new chair- 
man was tumultuously chosen, and resolutions were 
passed condemning John Brown's "piratical and 
bloody " work, and thanking Virginia for the con- 
servative spirit it had manifested. Constant collisions 
between the rival forces took place, the police con- 
tributing their own element of confusion. A more 
complete upsetting of 
the plans for the meet- 
ing could hardly have 
been achieved. Such 
was the effect upon 
the municipal author- 
ities that in January 
of 1 861 the mayor 
refused police protec- 
tion in a hall hired for 
an antislavery meet- 
ing. It was at this 
time that Wendell 
Phillips, walking to 
and from the Music 
Hall, where he was addressing Theodore Parker's 
Sunday congregations, had to be shielded by a body- 
guard against the crowd that followed him ; and for 




Tablet at Corner of Essex Street 
AND Harrison Avenue Extension. 



286 BOSTON 

many nights his house was similarly protected from 
violence. In moments of discouragement the anti- 
slavery workers might well have questioned the local 
value of their thirty years' labor. 

To describe with anything like completeness the 
years before the war in Boston would be to write 
much about Theodore Parker as the fiery apostle of 
antislavery. The conservatives who regarded his 
theology with horror could not admire the taste and 
discretion of many of his words and deeds. The ser- 
mon, for example, preached on the Sunday after 
Webster's death, and characterized by Mr. Rhodes as 
"indecent," was possibly even more obnoxious to 
respectable local sentiment than his cavalier treatment 
of miracles ten years earlier. Yet the influence of his 
spoken and printed word was far-reaching. It is told, 
even, that Lincoln's law-partner, Herndon, carried 
from Boston to Illinois pamphlet sermons by Parker, 
and that in one of these Lincoln marked with his pen- 
cil a phrase so nearly identical with his "government 
of the people, by the people, for the people " that to 
Parker its origin must fairly be attributed. In the 
complete record, also, there would be many pages 
with Webster for their theme. Against an imposing 
background of wealth and consideration such figures 
as those of Edward Everett, Robert C. Winthrop, 
and the representatives of commercial and social stabil- 
ity, would move with dignity by Webster's side. Still 
more, perhaps, would these records have to say of 
Charles Sumner, chosen by Preston S. Brooks of 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 287 




Charles Sumner. 
Photograph in possession of F. J. Garrison, Esq. 

South Carolina as the most harassing public foe 
of slavery, and made the victim of that assault in the 
Capitol at Washington which even at its late day won, 
like the Dred Scott decision a year later, many new 
friends to the cause at which both blows were aimed. 
But here, as before, the temptation to quit the field of 



288 BOSTON 

local for that of national history must be resisted. If 
the two fields frequently coincide, at least it is well 
to reserve for special emphasis the points at which the 
local characteristics are most marked. For this reason 
the thirty years before the war have been more care- 
fully regarded — though all too cursorily — than the 
years of civil warfare need to be. 

Indeed, it may fairly be said that the experiences of 
Boston throughout these years of doubt, devotion, and 
hope were essentially the experiences of all Northern 
cities. The call and the response of patriotic feeling 
were simultaneous. When Sumter fell, the flags broke 
forth from every height and corner, and the spirit ot 
the people was in them. It was the spirit which 
breathed through the vigorous action of Governor 
Andrew. On Monday, April 15, 1861, came Lin- 
coln's first call for troops. On Tuesday the soldiers 
Andrew had been preparing for this very emergency 
were gathered in Boston. On Wednesday three regi- 
ments were started for the front, the Sixth to pass 
through Baltimore. Ten days later Edward Everett, 
the recently defeated candidate for Vice-President on 
one of the tickets arrayed against Lincoln, declared: 
" All former differences of opinion are swept away. 
We forget that we ever have been partisans : we re- 
member only that we are Americans, and that our 
country is in peril." This was the dominant feeling 
of the place. Yet it was the union rather than emanci- 
pation which stirred and held the general loyalty. If 
in these early days of the war there were doubters, they 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 289 

indulged their doubts in secret. Later they expressed 
themselves more freely, as at the time of McClellan's 
visit to Boston when the war was two years old, and 
the Boston fainthearts feared that Lincoln could never 
end it. They then gave McClellan a sword with a 
Latin inscription which their spokesman translated, 
" For the administration, when it behaves itself; for 
the country always," Of the small class which was 
slowest to move forward with the time, Mr. Charles 
Francis Adams has written : " Even when there was 
hardly a family in the city which did not count father, 
brother, son, or husband in the field, talk as treason- 
able as it was idle was daily and hourly heard in the 
fashionable clubhouse of Beacon Street." But Mr. 
Adams attaches no more importance to this talk than 
the vital men of the sixties did, in Boston and other 
places where its counterpart was heard. None the less 
we may believe that Governor Andrew's secretary, 
Albert G. Browne, recorded a fact when he wrote : 
" Many a gallant young officer went down from 
Massachusetts into Virginia to battle, an unconscious 
hostage for the loyalty of men at home who in times 
of disaster might otherwise easily have fallen into indif- 
ference or opposition." Of the things which Northern 
cities had in common, it is of greater moment to recall 
those which most truly typified the time. Here was 
the national spirit of courageous sacrifice, whether of 
life or of those who made life most dear. Here, as 
elsewhere, the regiments marched away, the women 
dried their tears, waited and worked, as that great 



290 



BOSTON 



agency of good, the Sanitary Commission, enabled 
them to work, for the comforting of the boys at the 
front. Here the news of battles brought the griefs 
and joys which came with a common vividness to North 
and South. Here, in a word, the war-time generation 
lived those years of reality which have made so many 

of our later days seem trivial 
and pale. 

It would have been strange, 

y.^ -vc;. X however, if the years before 

/ W«^ ^f \ I ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ borne no dis- 

/ ;.»■ X \ a tinctive local fruits. Since 

war was to come, the place 
was fortunate in having men 
of authority who had profited 
by the vigorous thought and 
action of the antislavery pe- 
riod. Chief among these 
stood John Albion Andrew, 
GOVERNOR Andrew. ^]^q ^^j- governor, whose im- 

mediate response to Lincoln's first call for troops was 
typical of his leadership of Massachusetts throughout 
his five years in office. To his more radical anti- 
slavery friends, and to those who, like John Murray 
Forbes, had the scantest patience with the abolition- 
ists, Governor Andrew turned for the help he sorely 
needed. From the Pen Portraits of " Warrington " 
(William S. Robinson) it is worth while to repro- 
duce a picture of Mr. Forbes in the war-time, "more 
than any other man, the confidential adviser and 




THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 291 

helper of Governor Andrew. He attends to every- 
thing, writes letters, raises money (liberally contribut- 
ing himself), sends messages to Washington to direct 
and organize congressional opinion, makes or persuades 
editors to write leading articles to enforce his views, 
hunts up members of Congress in vacation time, dines 
them at the club, and sends them back full of practical 
suggestions, which reappear in bills and resolves the 
month after." In the allusion here made to editors, 
it is entirely probable that the work of the New Eng- 
land Loyal Publication Society was at the back of the 
writer's mind. This work was begun in Mr. Forbes's 
office, and seemed to him afterwards his best contribu- 
tion to the Union cause. As organized and carried 
out by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton and James B. 
Thayer, subsequently professor in the Harvard Law 
School, it consisted in sending to the editors of some 
nine hundred newspapers throughout the country 
broadside sheets containing the soundest loyal doctrine 
in politics and finance taken from the best speeches 
and articles of the day. Reprinted by the editors, the 
contents of these sheets reached approximately a mill- 
ion readers. The best intelligence of the place thus 
gave its effective service to a great democratic purpose. 
But of all the good work in which Governor Andrew 
and Mr. Forbes were associated, that which stands as 
the fullest flowering of thirty years of antislavery 
agitation in Boston was the raising of the Fifty-fourth 
Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, Colored. This 
was the first of all the negro regiments raised in the 



292 BOSTON 

Northern states. From the outbreak of the war Gov- 
ernor Andrew had eagerly wished to enlist colored 
troops ; but for two years the War Department with- 
held its consent. When permission was finally granted, 
it became a point of pride with the Governor to show 
the country that Massachusetts was ready to give of 
its best to the work, coldly regarded by many at the 
North and detested through the South, of officering a 
regiment of negroes. His choice for the colonelcy 
fell upon young Robert Gould Shaw, an officer of rare 
power, charm, and promise, who was already winning 
himself distinction in the Second Massachusetts. 
Turning his back on sure advancement there, and 
doubtful of his ability to command the new regi- 
ment, he gave himself heart and soul to the trial. 
His fellow-officers were of gentle birth and breeding 
like his own, and they were fellow-abolitionists. In 
the camp at Readville the spring days of 1863 were 
given to grounding the black command in the elements 
of soldiery. On the 28th of May they took steamer 
from Boston to South Carolina. Let Major Henry 
L. Higginson bring the day and its spirit back to us : 
*' Can you see those brave men well-drilled and disci- 
plined, proud of themselves, proud of their handsome 
colonel (he was only twenty-six years old) and of their 
gallant, earnest young white officers, marching through 
crowded streets in order to salute Governor Andrew, 
their true friend, standing before the State House sur- 
rounded by his staff of chosen and faithful aids ; and 
then once more marching to the steamer at Battery 




2 03 



THE SLAVE AND THE UNION 295 

Wharf, while thousands of men and women cheered 
them — the despised race — to the echo as they went 
forth to blot out with their own blood the sin of the 
nation ? Every negro knew that he ran other and 
greater risks than the soldiers of the white regiments ; 
and still more, every one of those white officers knew 
that even at the hands of many, many Northern offi- 
cers and men he would not receive equal treatment." 
In less than two months the regiment led the attack 
upon Fort Wagner, where the " fair-haired Northern 
hero" and nearly half his "guard of dusky hue" fell 
together and were buried in a common trench. 

On Memorial Day of 1897 the Shaw Monument, 
marking the scene of Andrew's farewell to the Fifty- 
fourth, was unveiled and presented to the city of 
Boston — a piece of sculpture which led the mother 
of Shaw to say to Mr. Augustus Saint Gaudens, its 
creator, " You have immortalized my native city, you 
have immortalized my dear son, you have immortalized 
yourself." In accepting the gift on behalf of the city, 
and truly interpreting the moment which the bronze 
has rendered perpetual, the Hon. Josiah Ouincy, the 
third mayor of his name, said : " The outward and 
visible sign of the enfranchisement of a race was here 
given when the fugitive slave, transformed into a soldier 
by authority of a liberty-loving state, went forth to bear 
his part in maintaining the union of the nation and 
winning the freedom of his people." Thus it is that 
Shaw and his men typify the ending of the work which 
Garrison began. Garrison was the voice, and Shaw the 



296 BOSTON 

arm. To the voice — to Garrison and his associates, 
says Mr. Rhodes, it was due that slavery became a 
topic of discussion at every Northern fireside. The 
voice was not for action, political or physical, so long 
as slavery remained a part of the national system under 
which the action must take place. It was this aloof- 
ness, this leaving of many practical labors to others, 
which contributed to the doubt and scorn wherewith 
many good men, as hostile to slavery as Garrison him- 
self, looked upon the Garrisonians. But the extremists 
had their work to do, and did it. So did the less 
radical perform theirs, with votes, through parties, 
the Liberty, the Free Soil, and finally the Republican. 
It was no small part of their work to bring the voice 
of the mere reformer and the arm of the mere soldier 
into common service for a great and single purpose. 
In Boston the blending elements through which this 
purpose was fulfilled must be remembered so long as 
Garrison, Sumner, and Shaw rise in bronze above the 
daily paths of citizenship. 



X 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 



T 



^HE monuments of a city 
tell much of its story, 
__ for in them the men whose 

^Hk J^ lives have been at various times 

W^'-d **1 ^^^ dominant lives of the place 

B*% j^ : 1^ are kept in continual memory. 

Stone and bronze are good 
reminders. So, too, are those 
other monuments which take 
their form in a perpetual hu- 
man activity — an institution 
or any enrichment of man- 
ra ^ kind — through which the 

I B generous spirit of a founder, 

■ ' — .■ discoverer, or leader is typified 

I ummw I for generations to come. Civic 

pride does a valuable work 
when it preserves the name of 
a man together with the good 
that he has done. The public 
places and the daily life of Boston are full of me- 
morials of citizens who have helped to give the place 
its individuality. When cast in the form of bronze, 
these memorials are of widely varying artistic merit. A 

297 




Washington. 

By Thomas Ball, in the Boston 
Public Garden. 



298 BOSTON 

poor statue, as we know too well, may stand for the 
best of men and deeds. To recall a few of the marked 
personages and achievements of the nineteenth century 
in Boston, whether the monument be a disappointment 
in bronze or a fulfilment of human purpose, is the 
undertaking of the present chapter. 

The names of Josiah Quincy and Edward Everett 
come instantly to mind as representative of a time 
which has passed away, — a time in which the most emi- 
nent men in a community were not, as now, the great 
specialists in finance, science, politics, or the arts, but 
attained an all-round development which had more in 
common with classic than with modern American 
standards. Thus when Lowell wrote his essay on 
Josiah Quincy he could give it, and its subject, no 
better title than " A Great Public Character." When 
Everett was called " The First Citizen of the Republic," 
the definition went unchallenged. These are two names 
which cannot be ignored. 

Josiah Quincy, separable as president of Harvard 
College from others of his name, himself the son of 
one Josiah Ouincy, Jr., and father of another, who was 
in turn the grandfather of the third mayor of Boston 
bearing the same name, came of a race identified 
throughout the history of Massachusetts with public 
service. The dates of his birth and death, 1772 and 
1864, justify Lowell's sentence: "The same eyes that 
had looked on Gage's red-coats saw Colonel Shaw's 
negro regiment march out of Boston in the national 
blue." This length of years was measured almost from 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 



299 



end to end by the fulfilment of public duties. Their 
variety included service in both houses of the General 
Court of Massachusetts, nine years in the national 
House of Repre- 
sentatives, where he 
became the leader 
of the P'ederalist 
party, five years in 
the mayoralty of 
Boston, — a post in 
which his only pred- 
ecessor had held 
office for a single 
year, leaving to the 
" great mayor " the 
chief burden of or- 
ganizing the new city 
government, — and 
sixteen years in the 
presidency of Har- 
vard. After perform- 
ing a large service of 
organization for the 
college as for the city. 
there were still many years to be accounted for. All 
these were honorably filled by labors of scholarship, in 
history and biography, by active interest in whatever 
concerned the good of his city and country, and by 
the pursuits of a farmer and gentleman of the school 
to which the definition " old " must be reluctantly 




JOSIAH QUINCY. 

Miniature by Malbone, in possession of 
J. P. Quincy, Esq. 



300 BOSTON 

attached. The biography of Josiah Ouincy by his son 
Edmund gives a picture of unwearying industry and a 
simple, even austere, dignity of private Hfe. The son 
cannot refrain from giving an amusing instance of the 
result of his father's practice of rising at four o'clock 
every morning. " This excess in early hours," says 
the biographer, " like every other excess, brought its 
penalty along with it." The penalty lay in falling 
asleep through the hours of the day. John Quincy 
Adams indulged the same excess. Once when he was 
visiting President Quincy in Cambridge, the two at- 
tended a lecture of Judge Story to his law class. The 
lecturer placed the visitors on a platform facing the 
students, and proceeded with his lecture. He soon 
saw that they were both sound asleep, and that his 
class saw it. " Pausing a moment in his swift career 
of speech, he pointed to the two sleeping figures, and 
uttered these words of warning : ' Gentlemen, you see 
before you a melancholy example of the evil effects of 
early rising ! ' " The laughter of the class awakened 
the sleepers, but it is not told that the disaster had more 
than a momentary effect upon either of them. Indeed 
we should not wish to see any changes in the strongly 
individual outlines of the classic figures in American 
life. It is better to recall them in that completeness 
which Motley suggested when he wrote from Vienna 
to Edmund Quincy soon after the death of his venera- 
ble father: "I shall borrow the expression of our 
friend Wendell Holmes and speak of him as the type 
and head of the Brahmins of America. A scholar, a 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 301 

gentleman, descended of scholars and gentlemen, a 
patriot and a son of a patriot, well known to all who 
knew America, — an upright magistrate, an eloquent 
senator, a fearless champion of the Right, a man of the 
world, a man of letters and a sage, with a noble pres- 
ence from youth onwards, which even in extreme old 
age did not lose its majesty, and which gave a living 
and startling contradiction to the great poet's terrible 
picture of man's ' seventh age,' — what better type 
could those of us who are proud of America, and who 
believe in America, possibly imagine ? " 

It was in a letter to Motley that Dr. Holmes 
likened Edward Everett to the yardstick by which 
men were measured in Boston. Even more than his 
contemporary, Josiah Quincy, Everett left a record of 
variety in achievement which makes our age seem an 
era of narrow specialism. An application of the 
Everett yardstick would reveal a striking change of 
standard between past and present measures. A bare 
list of his successive labors tells the story. Graduat- 
ing at the head of his class at Harvard at the age of 
seventeen, he was made a tutor in the college the next 
year. Before twenty he was ordained minister of the 
Brattle Street Church, where he proved himself a worthy 
successor of the eloquent Buckminster. At twenty he 
was chosen professor of Greek at Harvard, with an 
unprecedented four years' leave of absence for Euro- 
pean study. After his return he added the duties of 
editor _ of The North American Review to those of 
teaching. From 1825 to 1835 ^^ ^^^ ^ member 



302 



BOSTON 



of Congress. This term 
was followed by four 
years, ending in 1840, in 
the governorship of Mas- 
sachusetts. The next year 
he was appointed minis- 
ter to the Court of St. 
James. Then for three 
years from 1846, he filled 
the presidency of Harvard 
College, the immediate 
successor of Tosiah Ouin- 
cy. His public career was 
rounded out after Web- 
ster's death by holding 
the posts of Secretary of 
State, under Fillmore, and 
of Senator from Massa- 
chusetts. Against his per- 
sonal wishes he ran for the 
vice-presidency, in oppo- 
sition to the ticket on 
which Lincoln was first 
elected. When the Civil 
War broke out he brought the best gift at his com- 
mand — the gift of oratory — to the service of the 
Union. To swell the fund for the purchase of Mount 
Vernon he had already delivered in many parts of the 
country a lecture on the character of Washington, in 
which the " preservation of the Union of these States " 




Edward Evereit. 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 303 

was urged with all his ripened power. In 1861 he pre- 
pared a new address on " The Causes and Conduct of 
the Civil War." Within eight months from its first 
delivery in Boston, on October 16, he gave it in most 
of the large cities outside the hostile lines — no less 
than sixty times in all. In 1862 he reached his sixty- 
eighth year ; but bearing the burdens of age, besides 
those of feeble health and private bereavement, he 
went about this public business, travelling as far south 
and west as St. Louis. When he died in January of 
1865 this unique patriotic service, with further offer- 
ings of oratory up to the very week before his death, 
was freshly remembered by his countrymen. 

It is the common testimony of those who heard 
Everett that in hearing him they learned the meaning 
of the word eloquence. Distinction in the waning art 
of oratory demands many gifts, of which a retentive 
memory is not the least. In this possession Everett 
was endowed to an extent which relates him rather to 
such men as Macaulay than to the scholars and speak- 
ers of a later day. An exhibition of Everett's memory 
which naturally excited the wonder of his fellow-mem- 
bers of the Massachusetts Historical Society was made 
in his address to that body on the life and benefactions 
of Thomas Dowse. These benefactions were a collec- 
tion of paintings in the Athenaeum Gallery, and a 
library presented to the Historical Society. Without 
a note in his hands, and without a moment's hesitation 
for the recalling of a word, Everett recited a list of 
painters and writers in nearly every ancient and modern 



304 BOSTON 

language, one hundred and eighty names in all. If 
that was a heavy load for a speech to carry, it had, at 
least, an extraordinary interest as a feat of memory. 
Another instance of the same power had its occasion 
in the special acknowledgment of a privately printed 
history of an English county sent by its author, an 
English gentleman, to the Boston Public Library. 
Besides thanking the donor on behalf of the institution, 
Everett recalled the fact that he was present at Oxford 
when the gentleman received his degree ; " that he lis- 
tened " — in the words of Dr. Waterston's version of 
the story — " with great pleasure to a Poem w^hich that 
gentleman recited at that time, and that he was par- 
ticularly impressed by the following lines. Here he 
quoted a passage from a poem which had never been 
published, and which Mr. Everett heard incidentally 
from a young man at that time quite unknown, and in 
connection with the various public exercises of a Liter- 
ary Festival, and yet years after he could recall those 
lines, and send them across the Atlantic to their author, 
who was as much astonished as if he had heard a voice 
coming down to him from the heavens." But it is 
not for memory and scholarship, put even to the uses 
Everett made of these rich gifts of his, to win for their 
possessor the securest fame. Through leaving no 
single "great work" behind him, he has shared the 
fate of many orators. 

The permanence of Webster's fame as an orator, of 
course, owes much to the contribution many of his 
speeches made to the history of his generation. But 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 



305 



for his political eminence, even his towering personal- 
ity might not have preserved this fame. The other 
Boston orator, Rufus Choate, in whose spoken words 
our grandfathers took a pleasure both contemporary 
and equal with that afforded by Everett and Webster, 




House of Daniel Webster, Summer Street. 

has perhaps been even less fortunate with posterity 
than Everett. Yet it used to be said, " Webster is 
like other folks, only there is more of him ; but as to 
Choate, who saw or ever knew his like ? " The witty, 
learned lawyer, of incomparable quickness and power 
in winning a jury to his views, known in his day as 
the leader of the American bar, in local and national 



3o6 BOSTON 

politics a pillar of the Whig party, in private life the 
most delightful of companions, has come in less than 
half a century from his death to be strangely little more 
than a name. 

Through all of Everett's oratorical career he had no 
better opportunity to test his power of moving an 
audience than in the early occasion of Lafayette's pres- 
ence at the Phi Beta Kappa celebration at Harvard in 
1824. Everett was the orator of the day. Whatever 
his words of welcome may have owed in their effect to 
Lafayette himself, that effect was little short of tumul- 
tuous. For some minutes, at one point of the speech, 
the excitement was such that Everett was silenced. 
Old men leapt to their feet weeping for joyful memory 
of what the French hero of our Revolution had done 
for us. In the diary of one who was present are found 
the words, " Every man in the assembly was in tears." 
It is even told that Lafayette, lacking proficiency in 
the English tongue, missed the application of the ora- 
tor's words to himself, and when the tears were fol- 
lowed by deafening applause joined in it as lustily as 
the best.. 

The college commencements at Cambridge in these 
earlier years of the century took place in August. On 
the 17th of the following June, fifty years after 
the Battle of Bunker Hill, the cornerstone of the 
Bunker Hill Monument was laid. For this occasion 
Lafayette returned to Boston where, the summer be- 
fore, he had met with a reception of which Everett's 
address of welcome was but one of the incidents of an 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 307 

enthusiasm kindling the community in all its classes. 
The semi-centennial celebrations of great events in 
our national life had a freshness and fervor which have 
been lost as the occasions commemorated have gone 
farther into the past. The same flavor of youth that 
pervaded the maritime exploits of our early commerce 
entered the observance of days for public rejoicing. 
With the joy of the Bunker Hill day of 1825 was 
blended a solemnity due in part to the presence of 
Lafayette, and to the dignity of Webster's oration ; 
but also in great measure to the participation of the 
" venerable men " who had survived both the Bunker 
Hill fight and other Revolutionary battles. A stage- 
driver of the time accounted for the extraordinary 
crowd which thronged the city by saying, " Every- 
thing that has wheels and everything which has legs 
used them to get to Boston." The extent to which 
the community as a whole took part in the exercises is 
revealed by the record that the head of the civil and 
military procession to the site of the monument 
reached Charlestown Square before its rear on the 
Common had started. Indeed the spirit of contem- 
porary annalists of the occasion is rather that of per- 
sons who are themselves making history than of mere 
commemorators of the past. 

The building of the monument proceeded slowly. 
The leisurely growth of what was then almost an 
eighth wonder, was due, we may beheve, not so much 
to the temperate speed of the total abstinence work- 
men who alone were employed in the undertaking, 



3o8 BOSTON 

as to the slow accumulation of the needed funds. The 
Bunker Hill Monument Association had the matter 
in hand, but the completion of Solomon Willard's 
design, based practically upon a model submitted by 
Horatio Greenough while a collegian, would have been 
still longer delayed but for the ladies of Boston. In 
1 840 they organized a fair which cleared $30,000 
for the patriotic purpose. On the 17th of June, 1843, 
Webster delivered his second Bunker Hill oration, on 
the completion of the monument. President Tyler 
and his cabinet came from Washington for the occa- 
sion, and again the city gave itself over to general 
rejoicing. 

The pageantries of other days can be but partially 
imagined, yet for what they typify they are at least 
worth trying to recall. Within a decade from the 
completion of the Bunker Hill Monument there were 
two celebrations in Boston which expressed an honest 
naivete of local pride that would be almost impossible 
in our more sophisticated time. So many gigantic 
tasks are begun and ended by our contemporaries that 
perhaps we could not take with sufficient seriousness 
such achievements as the installation of a new system 
of water-works or the completion of railroads connect- 
ing Boston with Canada and the West. The first of 
these events — the introduction of water from Lake 
Cochituate into the streets and houses of Boston — took 
place October 25, 1848. The day was opened by the 
pealing of bells and a salute of one hundred guns. 
The chief glory of the holiday lay, of course, in the 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 309 

procession. It is difficult to imagine the occasion of 
our own times which could bring into a single line 
of march the elements which were blended on this 
autumn day of 1848. There were the dignitaries of 
the city, of the state, and of other states ; the presi- 
dent and officials of Harvard College, officers of the 
army and navy, the reverend clergy, the medical 
faculty, editors of newspapers throughout New Eng- 
land, representatives of many trades, secret orders, 
charitable and temperance organizations, sailors and 
marine societies, the city fire department, children 
from schools and asylums, and, to cut short a longer 
list, the members of the Handel and Haydn Society. 
This extraordinary cavalcade passed through streets 
adorned with biblical texts and inscriptions giving 
piecemeal the whole history of the water enterprise. 
Opposite the Boston Museum a Moorish arch bore 
such appropriate lines from Shakespeare as, " There 
will be a world of water shed." Amongst the moving 
trade displays were a complete printing-office in busy 
operation, and a provision-shop conducted by Faneuil 
Hall marketmen. Twenty-five representatives of 
the Seamen's Bethel manned a full-rigged sloop 
of war, with Father Taylor on the quarter-deck. The 
Salem East India Society provided an elaborate palan- 
quin borne by eight men in oriental costumes. The 
list might be extended almost indefinitely. Such a 
procession could move but slowly, and it was four 
o'clock before the dignitaries mounted a platform in 
the middle of the Frog-pond, and the multitude 



3IO BOSTON 

spread itself over the nearer and remoter slopes of 
the Common. Of course, there were speeches, and 
the Mayor, Josiah Quincy, Jr., ended his address by 
asking the great assembly if it were their pleasure that 
the water be turned on. A roaring " Ay " was the 
response. Then the water-gates were opened, and a 
column from sixty to eighty feet in height rose into 
the air. Even the city document, recording the doings 
of the day, preserves this enthusiastic record of that 
final scene : " The sun was just sinking below the 
horizon, and its last rays tinged the summit of the 
watery column, the bells began to ring — cannon were 
fired — and rockets streamed across the sky. To the 
multitude around, the scene was one of intense inter- 
est and excitement, which it is impossible to describe, 
but which no one can forget. After the first moment 
of surprise most of the spectators looked around upon 
their neighbors — some laughed aloud — the men 
swung their hats and shouted — and some even wept." 
The Mayor inform.ed the children that the schools 
would be closed and the fountain would play all the 
next day. Fireworks in the evening brought the cele- 
bration to a glittering close. 

Three years later the Railroad Celebration aroused 
the city to similar rejoicing, which covered a period 
of three days. There were banquets and speech-mak- 
ing, a harbor excursion, and a yacht race for the enter- 
tainment of visitors and natives. President Fillmore 
and Lord Elgin, Governor-general of Canada, were 
the most eminent of many distinguished guests. But 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 313 

the details are insignificant beside the meaning of such 
festivals as these — that here was a community grow- 
ing like a youth from strength to strength, and, with 
all that engaging freedom from self-consciousness which 
marks the youthful period, frankly rejoicing in its own 
achievements. 

While these spectacular public works, announced 
by the flourish of trumpets, were going forward, there 
were, through the same years of the nineteenth century 
in Boston, many quieter yet perhaps even more impor- 
tant undertakings on foot. Concerning one of them, 
the work of the Lowell Institute, Dr. Holmes made 
the following statement : " When you have said every 
enthusiastic thing that you may, you will not have 
half filled the measure of its importance to Boston 
— New England — the country at large." After all 
allowances are made for the zeal of a Bostonian, this 
declaration is enough to provoke either reflection or 
inquiry. The inquirer will learn that since 1840 the 
Lowell foundation has provided the people of Boston 
with free lectures, now numbering between five and 
six hundred each year, by the foremost scholars and 
thinkers of the English-speaking world. Reflection, 
aided by a long memory, will recall the early popular- 
ity of lectures in Boston. It is recorded that here, 
during the season before the Lowell Lectures were 
instituted, no less than twenty-six courses, not includ- 
ing those of less than eight lectures, were delivered, at 
an expense of more than :|^ 12,000, to audiences aggre- 
gating about 13,500 persons. The opportunity for 



314 



BOSTON 



the permanent filling of the want implied by these 
figures was therefore made in advance. The man 
whose generous provision for posterity filled it was 
John Lowell, Jr., son of Francis Cabot Lowell, the 
pioneer of the great cotton industry of Massachusetts. 
John Lowell, Jr., a first cousin of James Russell 
Lowell, belonged to a family which for many genera- 
tions has given of its best to the life of the community. 
In 1 83 I, before he was thirty, he found himself, through 
the death of his wife and two children, in the lonely 
possession of a large fortune. The accumulation of 
greater wealth in the mercantile career he had begun 
did not appeal to him, and he prepared himself for ex- 
tensive travel. A tour of the West came first. Then 
he went to Europe, where he made elaborate plans for 
visiting the countries of Asia. Proceeding to Egypt 
on his way thither, he was taken ill. His will had been 
drawn before he left America. At the village of 
Luxor, amongst the ruins of Thebes, he wrote a codi- 
cil, putting into final form his wishes with regard to 
the great bequest. When the first course of Lowell 
Institute Lectures was opened, Edward Everett in his 
address of dedication spoke of " the testamentary pro- 
visions drawn up in the land of Egypt, on the ruins 
of one of the oldest seats of art and civilization of 
which ruins remain, — provisions in which a great and 
liberal spirit, bowed down with sickness, in a foreign and 
a barbarous land, expressed some of its last aspirations 
for the welfare of his native city." Convalescent from 
the attack of illness in Egypt, Lowell made his way, 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 315 







John Lowfi.i., Jr. 
Painting by Gleyre, in possession of A. Lawrence I>owell, Esq. 

through shipwreck and many hardships, toward Bom- 
bay, where he died May 4, 1836, thirty-four years old. 
The will put aside nearly 1250,000 for the establish- 
ment of the lectures which have preserved this young 
man's name. It was provided that no part of princi- 
pal or income could be invested in buildings, and each 
year one-tenth of the income must be added to the 
principal. Though the trustees of the Boston 
Athenaeum were appointed "visitors," the entire 



3i6 BOSTON 

management of the Institute was vested in one trustee, 
who, within a week of his assuming office, must name 
his successor. The testator, besides naming his cousin 
John Amory Lowell as the first trustee, made this 
provision: "In selecting a successor the trustee shall 
always choose in preference to all others some male 
descendant of my grandfather, John Lowell, provided 
there be one who is competent to hold the office of 
trustee, and of the name of Lowell." Equally notice- 
able was the emphasis laid by John Lowell, Jr., upon 
the necessity of lectures dealing with Christianity and 
"the moral doctrines of the gospel." It was written, 
" No man ought to be appointed a lecturer, who is not 
willing to declare and who does not previously declare 
his belief in the divine revelation of the Old and New 
Testaments, leaving the interpretation thereof to his 
own conscience." The importance of scientific and 
literary subjects seems indeed to have been secondary 
in the testator's mind. In the progress of years it is 
evident that a liberal interpretation must have been 
placed upon these wishes of the founder, yet the trus- 
tees have constantly taken a broad view of the truly 
vital interests in the world of thought, and have been 
wise in excluding crude theories of which the value is 
still to be proved. The generous income from the 
fund has made the best remuneration possible. In 
early days a single course would sometimes yield the 
lecturer a larger reward than the annual salary of the 
most eminent professor in any American college. The 
list of lecturers, beginning with Benjamin Silliman of 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 317 

Yale, proceeds through all the years with a shining 
catalogue of names. No less remarkable is the list of 
books which were first given to the public in the form 
of Lowell Lectures. 

The response of the Boston public to the privileges 
of the Institute has always been eager. In the second 
season so great a crowd applied for tickets to a course 
by Silliman that the windows of the Old Corner Book- 
store, where the distribution took place, were broken 
in. Sometimes there were eight or ten thousand appli- 
cants for a single course, and it became necessary to 
dispense the tickets by lot. When the rule to close 
the doors of the lecture room at the very beginning of 
a lecture was first adopted, it met with violent opposi- 
tion. So keen a desire for knowledge was displayed 
by one respectable gentleman that he attempted to 
kick his way through the closed door, — an attempt 
which led him to the lock-up, not the lecture room. 
More peaceful methods have come to prevail, and all 
the while the Lowell Institute has been making those 
contributions to the intelligence of the community 
which compelled Professor Drummond, after he came 
to Boston and could measure at closer range the capac- 
ity of the audience he must face, to rewrite entirely 
the course of lectures he had prepared. 

To the same general end of diffused intelligence for 
which Lowell wrought by his liberality, Horace Mann 
rendered an important service by his labors. We have 
grown accustomed to the name of educator and his 
work. To Horace Mann as an organizer of educa- 



3i8 



BOSTON 



tional forces a memorable debt is due. The town of 
Franklin, not far from Boston, was his birthplace. 
There is a story that when the town was young, Ben- 
jamin Franklin, after whom it was named, received 

word from the citizens that 
they would build a meeting- 
house if he would present it 
with a bell. His character- 
istic response was that they 
had better save their money 
and build no steeple. Instead 
of the bell he offered them 
books — " since sense was 
preferable to sound." Ac- 
cordingly, books to the value 
of ^25 were sent from Lon- 
don, and from these Horace 
Mann learned some of his first 
lessons in Benjamin Frank- 
lin's wholesome doctrine. Not at Harvard, like so many 
of his fellows, but at Brown, he received his collegiate 
education. To Massachusetts he returned for the prac- 
tice of law, first in Dedham, then in Boston. In both 
branches of the Massachusetts General Court he did 
the work of a legislator. The State Board of Education 
was created in 1837. For twelve years Mann was its 
secretary, and a most active member. To friends sur- 
prised that he should abandon the law for what seemed 
so indefinite a post he made answer : " The interests 
of a client are small compared with the interests of the 




Horace Mann. 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 319 

next generation. Let the next generation, then, be my 
client." This client he served faithfully and well. It 
is said that when he came into office two-thirds of the 
teachers in Massachusetts got their places without 
examination. The schools were in need of many re- 
forms, modernizing, enriching, and lifting to the high 
democratic point of excellence which should make them 
good enough for rich and poor alike. These were re- 
forms which could not be made without opposition. It 
came from the Orthodox who dreaded the Unitarian 
influence of Mann, and feared that " godless schools " 
would result from the reading of the Bible without 
comment. It came from Boston school-teachers who 
could not follow the leadership of one who himself had 
not taught. With these warring elements Mann found 
himself in more than one acute controversy. The 
weapons of the fighter with words were completely in 
Mann's control, and so violently did he use them at 
times that even his friends had cause to tremble. But 
the agitation of which he was the centre produced an 
awakening of interest in the public schools of Boston 
which resulted entirely in good, and has not yet subsided. 
Throughout the state his work for primary and sec- 
ondary education, for normal schools and the district 
libraries which paved the way for the free public libra- 
ries of Massachusetts, yielded fruit for his clients in 
more than one generation to come. All that he did 
in the cause of antislavery in and out of Congress, 
where he became the successor of John Quincy Adams, 
bore but an indirect relation to his work as an educator. 



320 BOSTON 

To this work he returned, devoting the closing years 
of his life to the presidency of Antioch College in 
Ohio. Now that his years of conflict are far in the 
past he takes the place his biographer, Mr. B. A. 
Hinsdale, has assigned him as the opportune man who 
put the cause of popular education in America truly on 
its feet, and made Massachusetts " the leader in educa- 
tional reform, holding a position among the states com- 
parable to Mr. Mann's position among educational 
men." On the issues of politics he difi^ered so widely 
from Daniel Webster that there is an ironic humor in 
the companionship of the statues of the two men be- 
fore the State House on Beacon Hill; but the right 
of the pioneer in education to this place of honor is no 
more questioned than that of the defender of the Con- 
stitution. 

Though the intimate friend of Horace Mann in the 
flesh. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, lacks a monument 
of bronze in the streets of Boston, he has his more 
living memorial in the work of " The Perkins Institu- 
tion and Massachusetts School for the Blind." Like 
Mann, he was prepared at Brown University for the 
work he chose to do. It would be easy to fill many 
pages with the story of his varied activities. One of 
the earliest and most romantic of them was his per- 
sonal enlistment, like Byron's, in the cause of Greek 
liberty. It was prophetic of his lifelong devotion to 
one or another movement for the emancipation of his 
less fortunate fellow-men. Through all the anti- 
slavery agitation there was no more consistent friend 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 



321 



of the enslaved than Dr. Howe. Yet if we may accept 
the comparison Dr. Hedge once drew between him 
and too many of the race of reformers, he deserves to 
be remembered for a quahty of tolerance that is rare 
indeed. " Advocates 
of temperance I have 
known," said Dr. 
Hedge, " who reeled 
and staggered and 
wanted to intoxicate 
you with their heady 
politics ; champions 
of abolition I have 
known who wanted 
to fasten the yoke of 
their method on your 
neck ; and even apos- 
tles of non-resistance 
who handled their 
olive-branch as if it 
were a war club. 
Dr. Howe was not of that line. He was that excep- 
tional character, — a tolerant enthusiast, a fair advocate 
of a righteous cause." 

The cause with which his name is chiefly associated 
is the rescue of the deaf-blind from their imprisonment 
behind the barriers of silence and darkness. As a young 
man he made his second journey to Europe for the 
purpose of studying the methods of educating the blind 
in Paris and elsewhere. In 1832 his first school, with 




Thomas Handasyd Perkins. 
Painting by Gambardella. 



322 BOSTON 

half a dozen pupils, was opened in modest quarters. 
The raised type for teaching the blind to read was 
laboriously made by pasting twine on cardboard. Exhi- 
bitions of the skill rapidly acquired by the pupils soon 
began to attract attention. Among those most inter- 
ested was Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, merchant 
and ship-owner, in whom the power of wealth and the 
spirit of liberality were blended in fortunate proportion. 
One who saw him first as an old man remarked that 
then his face itself seemed an institution of benevolence. 
The great service he rendered the Institution for the 
Blind was in offering it a mansion and grounds in Pearl 
Street, valued at 125,000, on the condition that others 
should raise ^50,000 for the same good object. Within 
a month the sum was raised, partly through private 
subscriptions, partly through a fair in Faneuil Hall 
conducted by ladies, and drawing contributions of many 
an article for sale from the great source known as 
"everybody." In 1839 the land speculations which 
were to have made South Boston the " court end " of 
town brought into the market at a low figure the hotel 
building which, with enlargements, the institution has 
occupied from that time to the present. In this year 
of 1839 ^^- Howe's annual report made the statement : 
" This is certain, that when audiences in England and 
Scotland were uttering by shouts their astonishment and 
pleasure that blind children could read books in raised 
letters, it had ceased altogether to be a matter of sur- 
prise in this country, so common had it become." In 
the institution at South Boston Dr. Howe wrought 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 323 

what seemed, and was, the miracle of leading to intelli- 
gent womanhood the deaf, dumb, and blind child, 
Laura Bridgman, whom he found in a New Hamp- 
shire farmhouse, doomed, but for his loving patience, 
sympathy, and insight, to the steadily contracting life 
of the unaided defective. If his work had begun and 
ended with Laura Bridgman, it would have been 
extraordinary ; but it has served as the ground of 
hope and the starting-point of effort on behalf of so 
many whose misfortunes have been turned almost into 
advantages, that Dr. Howe must be admitted to the 
company of the true pioneers in human progress. 

While his great work was going forward in South 
Boston, there was demonstrated in the opposite, or 
West End of the town, a discovery which has put the 
world itself in the debt of a Boston dentist. The 
Massachusetts General Hospital, incorporated in 181 1, 
and established ten years later, in one of the best build- 
ings of Bulfinch's design, was the scene of the first 
surgical operations upon patients made insensible to 
pain by the beneficent use of ether. When a dis- 
covery has brought to the human race such blessings 
as those of modern surgery — of which the very pos- 
sibility depends upon anaesthetics — it is lamentable 
that the record of the great forward step must be in 
large measure a record of controversy. 

The monument to William Thomas Green Morton 
in the Boston Public Garden may be taken to represent 
the award of posterity in the dispute between the two 
chief claimants to the glory of the discovery. The 



324 BOSTON 

second of these men was a Boston physician, Charles 
r. Jackson. He was the same Dr. Jackson who con- 
tended with Samuel F. B. Morse for the honors of 
invention in telegraphy — with such success as the 
comparative flimiliarity of his name and that of Morse 
implies. The chief points of the ether story, as told 
in pamphlets and testimony carried even to a com- 
mittee appointed by Congress to decide between the 
claimants, are these : Dr. Morton had practised den- 
tistry under Dr. Horace Wells of Hartford, an 
experimenter with an;usthetics, for whom also the 
disputed honors have been claimed. After coming 
to Boston Dr. Morton studied under Dr. Jackson. 
Later, when seriously considering the possibilities of 
anaesthesia in dentistry, he went to Jackson tor advice, 
and the use of rectified sulphuric ether was recom- 
mended. This was not a discovery of Jackson's. 
Several years before, acting on a suggestion of Sir 
Humphry Davy, he had himself inhaled sulphuric 
ether, with the result of unconsciousness. He had 
not tried it for the prevention of pain. Morton 
immediately proceeded with the experiment, first upon 
himself, then, September 30, 1846, on a patient will- 
ing to attempt unconsciousness during the extraction 
of a tooth. On the next day Morton hastened to 
Jackson with the news of his success. This time 
Jackson advised the dentist to lay the matter before 
the surgeons of the Massachusetts General Hospital. 
He did so, and on October 16, 1 846, was permitted 
to administer ether to a patient upon whom Dr. John 



MEN AND M0NUMI:NTS 325 

C. Warren performed an operation with such success 
that the painless removal of a tumor and the amputa- 
tion of a leg, within three weeks of Dr. Warren's ini- 
tial venture, established beyond doubt the inestimable 
value of the new achievement. 

Then it was that Dr. Jackson and his friends came 
into prominence. Though Morton offered the free 
use of his discovery to hospitals, the army and the 
navy, he expected to ask of general practitioners a 
moderate annual payment. To whom did the dis- 
coverer's rewards of fame and fortune really belong ? 
The friends of Jackson recognized in him a Columbus, 
and in Morton merely the sailor who first shouted 
" land " from the masthead. Morton was willing to 
yield and Jackson to accept one-tenth part of the 
profits. In the end it mattered little, commercially, 
what arrangements were made, for the use of ether 
became so general and essential that Morton waived 
his rights, and called himself " the only person in the 
world to whom this discovery has so far been a pecun- 
iary loss." In 1848 the trustees of the Massachu- 
setts General Hospital and other citizens of Boston 
presented him, as the true discoverer, with a box con- 
taining ^1000. When the French Academy made 
its award of 2500 francs to Jackson and to Mor- 
ton alike, it distinguished between the recognition 
of a scientific fact by the one and its application 
by the other. Thus, as the trustees of the hospital 
foretold, there must remain an indissoluble, though 
reluctant, copartnership between the two men. How 



326 BOSTON 

petty the controversy would appear to succeeding 
generations the parties to it could hardly have im- 
agined. But to them the burden of suffering lifted 
from men and women in every quarter of the globe 
could not appear as the historic and the daily fact we 
know it to be. For the foundation of this fact we 
turn with gratitude to what was done in Boston on the 
last day of September, 1846. 

This fourth decade of the nineteenth century was 
uncommonly fruitful of good things in Boston. Some 
of them have been touched upon. Incomplete indeed 
would be the list if the Boston Public Library were 
omitted from it. Though it was not till the fifties 
that the institution from which the present library has 
grown took definite form, its real beginnings were in 
the forties. As early as the seventeenth century there 
are allusions to a public library in the town house. 
There were large private collections, especially in the 
eighteenth century, made by such clergymen as the 
Mathers and Thomas Prince, and to these books 
the public had some access. As time went on various 
learned bodies built up libraries of their own. In 
1794 the "Boston Library," a private proprietary 
institution, came into being. Still later, as a previous 
chapter has shown, the Athenaeum made a larger 
entrance to the same field. Thus, and through many 
subsidiary channels, the reading habit, characteristic of 
the place from its earliest years, was nourished. The 
idea of free books for the whole public was yet to 
be born. When the military awaited the arrival of 




D 02 



3 2a 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 329 

Lafayette at the city line, free punch was provided, 
together with more solid refreshments. " Had any 
one proposed to provide free books at the expense of 
the tax-payers," wrote the second Mayor Quincy 
regarding this circumstance, " there would have been 
much indignation. We should have been aghast at 
the impudence of such a proposal ; but a few glasses of 
punch was another matter." It is a fact of curious 
interest that the first stimulus to a public awakening on 
the subject of free books came from a Parisian, and the 
first substantial contribution to the project from a 
London banker. By reason of this fact Vattemare and 
Bates have their rightful place amongst those distin- 
guished local names which, written in letters of brass, 
help to pave the entrance hall of the present Library 
building. 

Alexandre Vattemare was an unusual person. He 
has been variously defined as a charlatan, a conjurer, 
and a personator. The last appears to be the truest 
definition, for his employment, under the name of Alex- 
andre, was that of entertaining audiences by the assump- 
tion of different characters, sometimes more than forty 
in a single evening. His powers of imitation made 
him a welcome and familiar figure throughout Europe. 
During his travels, it has been written, he was " feted 
by three emperors, and by quite a rabble of kings." 
Sir Walter Scott was among his warm admirers. A 
strange trait for one of his occupation was a keen inter- 
est in books. Wherever he went, he visited the local 
libraries, and generally found them of scant public 



330 BOSTON 

usefulness. To remedy this condition he devised an 
elaborate plan for international exchanges of books, 
and used all his powers to further it. " When Vatte- 
mare failed," he said, " to interest the attention or 
gain admission to important personages, Alexandre 
took his place and carried the day." Having done 
much for his system in Europe he came, first in 1839, 
at the instance of Lafayette, to America. Both houses 
of Congress and several state legislatures indorsed his 
project. In 1841, and again in 1847-8, he was in 
Boston urging his plan, involving the establishment 
of a free public library, upon all in authority who 
would give him audience. Exchanges of books were 
actually made between the municipal authorities of 
Boston and of Paris, and a room was set aside in the 
City Hall for the French collection and the other con- 
tributions to a public library which it provoked. Be- 
tween 1843 ^^^ 1852 successive committees of the 
city government dealt with the library question, which 
assumed a steadily growing importance in the public 
mind. In 1854 the city opened a public reading-room 
and library in the Adams Schoolhouse on Mason 
Street. The plan of international exchanges came to 
little or nothing ; but the, greater cause for which the 
zealous Frenchman labored was fairly launched. 

Shortly before this small beginning, the London 
banker, Joshua Bates, head of the Barings firm, entered 
the history of the library. Bates was a Massachusetts 
boy, born in Weymouth, and in his young manhood 
had been associated with a Boston shipping house. 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 331 

After a disastrous attempt at business on his own 
account in Boston, he went to Europe in a mercantile 
position of trust, and came by such steps to his connec- 
tion with the great banking house. In 1852 the city 
of Boston was negotiating a water loan with the Bar- 
ings. With other city documents the latest report of 
the library committee was sent to London. There it 
happened to fall under the eye of Joshua Bates, who 
recognized amongst the signers the names of gentlemen 
he knew and trusted. On October i, 1852, he wrote 
to the mayor, saying in effect that in so liberal and 
wealthy a community as Boston the recommendations 
of the library report were of course sure to be carried 
out ; but in order to hasten the desired day, he made 
an immediate gift of 150,000 for the purchase of books. 
To the gift was attached the condition that the library 
building should be an ornament to the city and should 
contain a room large enough to accommodate from 100 
to 150 persons at reading tables. The letter which he 
wrote at the same time to a Boston friend reveals some- 
thing of the impulse behind the gift. " My own expe- 
rience as a poor boy," he said, " convinced me of the 
great advantage of such a library. Having no money 
to spend and no place to go to, not being able to pay 
for a fire or light in my own room, I could not pay for 
books, and the best way I could pass my evenings was 
to sit in Hastings, Etheridge, & Bliss's bookstore, and 
read what they kindly permitted me to." Bates Hall, 
crowded day and night with eager readers both in the 
old building and in the new, has therefore had a greater 



33^ 



BOSTON 



significance than the mere words which define it can 
suggest. 

A second gift from Joshua Bates added another 
$50,000 to the funds of the Library. The impression 
that Paris and London provided the entire impetus for 
the new undertaking would, however, be quite false. 
There were, besides municipal appropriations, liberal 
gifts of money from Boston citizens, and liberal expendi- 
tures of time and thought. Ticknor and Everett were 
especially active in the enterprise. The purchase of 
books from the income of Bates's first gift required a 
journey to Europe. When it was decided that Tick- 
nor rather than Everett should go, he consulted such 
men as Agassiz, Felton, Holmes, Benjamin Peirce, and 
William Barton Rogers regarding the compilation of a 
list of books most needed in all departments of knowl- 
edge. Between Ticknor and Everett there was also a 
friendly disagreement about the free circulation of 
popular books. In the end the views of Ticknor in 
favor of this course prevailed. The decision was in 
keeping with the identification of the Library from its 
earliest years with the public school system of the city. 
The growth of the institution from the modest rooms 
in Mason Street into and out of the Boylston Street 
building, deemed at its opening sufficient for a century 
to come, has been unbroken. The present structure 
in Copley Square, where more than eight hundred 
thousand volumes are housed, and whence the work 
of ten branch libraries and twenty-one stations for the 
delivery of books is directed, has become an object of 



MEN AND MONUMENTS :^3S 

pilgrimage, scholarly, educational, and artistic, for a 
population extending far beyond the limits of Boston 
itself. 

Another Boston institution, a near neighbor of the 
Public Library, owing much in its inception and prog- 
ress to men who have been Bostonians only by adop- 
tion, is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
To the forties also must be ascribed its very begin- 
nings. In this period of the century it became evident 
that the industrial development of New England de- 
manded a species of practical education which the older 
colleges were not supplying. Between William Barton 
Rogers, a professor in the University of Virginia, and 
his brother Henry, temporarily in Boston, letters 
were exchanged in 1846, carefully considering the 
possibilities of establishing a great polytechnical school, 
and the preeminence of Boston as the place for it. 
The marriage of Professor W. B. Rogers, in 1849, ^^ 
the daughter of a Boston family, naturally led to his 
removal a few years later from Virginia to Boston. 
Through all the fifties the project of a technical school 
was in the air. In 1859 a meeting for the purpose of 
bringing it to earth was held in the rooms of the Bos- 
ton Society of Natural History. It was proposed to 
reserve for the new institution a considerable tract of 
the Back Bay, then undergoing conversion from water 
into land; and one of the gentlemen present urged the 
project on the grounds that residents of Beacon Hill, 
used to the cooling summer breezes from the Back 
Bay, would appreciate the effect of open spaces in the 



33^ 



BOSTON 



7/lliL\,M ^\A\m Jui.^iLlL LA 

rhi Ti V.J w 



■^"^n^- \i.nu 










Tablet in the Rogers Building, Massachusetts Institute 
OF Technology. 

new land. Another thought the purchase of the Han- 
cock House, then on the market, would provide suf- 
ficient accommodations. A far larger plan prevailed, 
and the resulting petition to the legislature was for 
four squares of land, to be devoted to an elaborate 
"Conservatory of Art, Science, and Historical Relics," 
with the ends of popular education held clearly in 
view. This memorial, and a second of similar nature, 
bore no direct results. A third memorial, represent- 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 337 

ing in large measure the thought and labors of Pro- 
fessor Rogers, produced a bill which passed both 
branches of the legislature, and received, April 10, 
1 86 1, the signature of Governor Andrew. With this 
act the labors of Rogers, in whom the governor had 
unbounded confidence, were redoubled, for it was pro- 
vided that within a year the friends of the new institu- 
tion must raise one hundred thousand dollars. With 
the cloud of war filling the whole southern horizon, it 
was a hopeless time to beg for a cause so purely of 
peace. At the end of the year, an extension of another 
year was asked and granted. When the second year 
was nearly ended, only $40,000 had been pledged, and 
further delay seemed inevitable. On the very last of 
the days of grace came the dramatic announcement 
from President Rogers, as he had been called for a 
year, that Dr. William J. Walker, formerly of Boston, 
then of Newport, had made over to the Institute a 
piece of property worth at least the indispensable sum 
of $60,000. The service of public lectures on scien- 
tific subjects had already been undertaken. In the 
winter of 1865 the School of Industrial Science, which 
to-day performs the chief work of what has long been 
called " The Tech," received its first pupils in a private 
house on Rowe Place, and in rooms of the Mercantile 
Library Association in Summer Street, buildings which 
were both destroyed in the fire of 1872. 

If it has been an uphill work to carry over the 
financial crisis of 1873, and through nearly forty other 
years an institution so near the oldest seat of learning 



338 BOSTON 

in America, making, as it naturally does, the first and 
strongest appeals to the affection and generosity of the 
community, the Institute has been signally fortunate 
in those who have had the work to do. Interrupted 
only by ill health. President Rogers, a true teacher 
and enthusiast in the application of scientific fact to 
daily life, wisely guided the great undertaking from 
the years in which it was a mere dream to that com- 
mencement of 1882 when he died in the very act of 
handing his leadership over to General Francis A. 
Walker. Like Rogers, his successor had the advan- 
tage of a training — in the army, in the national offices 
of Statistics, Indian Affairs, and the Census — which 
knew no local bounds. In Boston he took his place 
as a citizen of broad interests, ready to respond to the 
many calls for useful participation in local affairs which 
came to him. Through the continuous leadership of 
such men the Institute, with all its "specializing," has 
exerted a strong influence of liberalization in its neigh- 
borhood. The methods of instruction it has steadily 
pursued could hardly have had another effect. It is 
thus that a member of the Corporation of the Institute 
has defined them : " By means of ever developing and 
enlarging laboratories, the Institute has maintained the 
principle that a student shall not take on the word of 
his teacher what is reasonably possible for him to prove 
himself. This simple, but far-reaching, principle has 
acted as an extraordinary leaven upon education, modi- 
fying the entire system." 

During all this progress of the practical, the arts, 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 



339 



scantily nourished by the Puritans and their immedi- 
ate offspring, were gradually coming to their own in 
Boston. Of the alternately stormy and solemn be- 
ginnings of the drama we have already had a glimpse. 




House of Edwin Booth, Chestnut Street. 

The theatrical history of Boston does not differ mate- 
rially from that of other seaboard cities in America. 
There were the same meteoric visits of foreign actors, 
prophetic of a later system of stars. There was the 
same satisfaction and sense of proprietorship in the 
stock companies which long continued to instruct and 



340 BOSTON 

delight our audiences with classic English comedy. 
Through all the changing conditions the strong local 
interest in the drama has been accompanied by a 
healthy pride in local actors. The city of Boston 
did not wait for the death of Charlotte Cushman to 
build a schoolhouse on the site of her birthplace and 
to give it her name. To the memory of Mrs. Vin- 
cent, a beloved member of the stock company which 
for many years gave the Boston Museum its distinc- 
tion, a free hospital for women stands not far from 
where she lived. William Warren, her fellow-player 
in the theatre only this year demolished, has his local 
monument in the portrait hung where every visitor to 
the Museum of Fine Arts must see it. The Boston 
theatre-goer likes to remember that on the stage of 
the Boston Museum Edwin Booth, in 1849, made his 
first theatrical appearance, and that in his house on 
Chestnut Street, now devoted to the instruction of 
youth, some of the most tranquil of his troubled years 
were passed. 

Music, excepting psalmody, met with little more 
favor in earlier Boston than the drama itself It is a 
strange association, therefore, which links the Park 
Street Church, a central support of Puritan tradition, 
with the first important step of musical progress in 
Boston. This was the formation of the Handel and 
Haydn Society, in 1815. The Park Street Church had 
an excellent choir of some fifty voices, and from this 
number many of the singers for the new organization 
were drawn. The chorus which a month before had 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 343 

sung the oratorio at the Peace Jubilee in the " Stone 
Chapel " to celebrate the conclusion of the War of 
1812 may be regarded as the immediate forerunner 
of the Handel and Haydn. Though it was primarily 
sacred music to which the Park Street singers lent 
themselves, a constant improvement in the musical 
standard of the place resulted from the unbroken 
work of this society. Thus the people were ready 
for the secular orchestral concerts provided by the 
Boston Academy of Music and the Musical Fund 
Society's orchestras, especially in the fourth decade of 
the century. Italian opera, never fully domesticated, 
had its periods of enthusiastic welcome. In 1850 
Barnum, with his showman laurels still to win, brought 
Jenny Lind to Boston for two concerts in the Fitch- 
burg railroad station. The zeal of his agent and of 
the community were well matched, for tickets were 
sold to a thousand persons more than the station could 
hold. To this circumstance and its untoward results the 
building of the Boston Music Hall, as a place in which 
Jenny Lind's unexampled power over American audi- 
ences could properly be exercised, is said to have been 
due. In 1852 the Music Hall was opened. In 1863 
the great organ, so long the special glory of musical 
Boston, was dedicated therein. By this time, indeed, 
there was a musical Boston, towards the making of 
which a single individual, John Sullivan Dwight, and 
a single club, the Harvard Musical Association, the 
outgrowth of a college musical society, had done all 
that one person and one organization could accom- 



344 



BOSTON 




"V 



Coli.vri,rlil, ISO'.I, I.J Ui-ln L. Fratl. 





Fr..ii. ^L C.iiil, V I'nnt, v.ipyni;ht. 1809, bj Cur 

Phillips Brooks. 
Bust bv Bela L. Pratt. 



pllsh. In 1867 the New England Conservatory of 
Music, whose pupils have carried its lessons into all 
regions of the country, was established. Early in 
the eighties the Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded 
and steadily supported by individual generosity, began 
its all-important work of teaching the public to expect 
and to know the best in orchestral music. Through 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 345 

all these agencies, strengthened by the devotion of 
musicians and amateurs of music whose names would 
make too long a catalogue, the progress of their art 
in Boston since the days of the Park Street choir and 
the Peace Jubilee of 1815 has kept an even pace with 
the passing years. 

The annals of painting and sculpture in Boston pre- 
sent for most of the nineteenth century a list of names 
not long but memorable. What may be called the 
organization of these arts has been accomplished 
chiefly within the past thirty years. With the name 
and work of John Singleton Copley, albeit transplanted 
from Boston to England for the second half of his long 
life, an inspiring tradition passed from the eighteenth 
into the nineteenth century. It was carried on by 
Washington Allston, a South Carolinian by birth, 
allied to Boston through marriage into the Channing 
and the Dana families, and by residence, after his two 
returns from Europe, in Boston and in Cambridgeport. 
For more than twenty years also the Rhode Islander, 
Gilbert Stuart, made his home in Boston, and enriched 
its more fortunate houses with many of his best por- 
traits. From Boston Horatio Greenough went to 
Florence, first of the long-lived Italian colony of 
American sculptors. To Boston, after years of study 
in Europe and a shorter period of painting in New- 
port, came William Morris Hunt in 1862, and here 
much of his most characteristic work was done. The 
short list of names might be made a little longer, yet 
these will serve to show that the end of the century. 



346 BOSTON 

with its troop of painters, was not needed to bring to 
Boston the influences of foreign masters and methods. 
The annual and permanent exhibitions of paintings and 
sculpture in the Athenaeum gallery, for half a century 
from 1826, did their service in cultivating a public taste 
for art. In 1869 a bequest of arms and armor to the 
Athenaeum collection presented difficulties of exhibition 
which only a new building could solve. Thus the 
Museum of Fine Arts became a necessity. Before it 
was completed the armor went the way of many valu- 
ables in the fire of 1872. But subscriptions for the 
new Museum, in sums from $25,000 down to contri- 
butions of less than a dollar, had secured the erection 
of the building, now almost outgrown, which was 
opened to the public on July 3, 1876. The best of 
the Athenaeum collection was transferred to its walls 
and corridors. Private bequests and loans have helped 
in establishing its present usefulness to the few and to 
the many, for it has never been forgotten that both 
the many and the few gave according to their ability 
toward its creation, and to this Boston public the 
Museum conspicuously belongs. 

As there are institutions belonging to a whole com- 
munity, so there are men. Of these, in later years, 
the figure standing forth most vividly is that of Phillips 
Brooks — and with him this rambling survey of men 
and monuments of the nineteenth century must come 
to a close. In his singleness of efix)rt and achievement 
he clearly typified the difference between the earlier and 
later years of the century. Ouincy and Everett could 




Trinity Chl'kch Tovvek. 



MEN AND MONUMENTS 349 

excel, as public characters, in a dozen pursuits. 
Phillips Brooks, rector of Trinity Church and bishop 
of Massachusetts, devoted his undivided energies to 
the calling of the Christian ministry. Yet in another 
and a true sense he too was a public character. In an 
age of specialism, he was the specialist in religion, — a 
subject happily broad enough, as he saw it, to save one 
of his nature from the perils of narrowness. His per- 
sonal background, like that of the writers who made 
the Boston of their day our "literary centre," related 
him in every way to the best traditions of the place. 
Like the leaders of " the Boston Religion," in an ear- 
lier generation, he was inherently and by inheritance a 
true leader of men. Unlike them he had the advan- 
tage of accepting a system of faith defined, not by a 
local term, nor yet too rigidly, as he and many others 
have thought, for application to the needs of modern 
life. Thus in many ways a typical product of local 
conditions, he could yet bring to the local life an influ- 
ence which greatly broadened its limits. Surely in a 
special degree for those amongst whom he lived, he 
wrought a quickened spiritual sense, a richer tolerance 
and understanding between man and man. The space 
before Trinity Church may still afford to wait the 
monument which is to stand there, for the people of 
Boston hardly need to be reminded yet that their city 
is a better place because Phillips Brooks lived in it. 



XI 



WATER AND FIRE 




TT TE have regarded many manifes- 



tations of the spirit of Boston. 
It lemains to consider two important 
aspects of its present outward form. 
Within little more than the period 
is^frfmrA-j^ ascribed to a single generation of 
^f '*~"'" men, it has become a new city, 
both in the favorite region of 
residences and in the district 
in or near which the chief busi- 
ness of the city is conducted. 
In. the making of the present 
Boston, the conquests of water 
and fire have played an impor- 
tant part. Just as the early town was " wharfed out with 
great industry and cost " into the sea, so has the modern 
city grown over the waters that for more than two 
centuries separated it, but for a slender neck of earth, 
from the southern and western uplands of Roxbury 
and Brookline. The early settlement, devastated so 
often by fires that, according to Cotton Mather, it 
gained the proverbial name of Lost-Town, recovered 
and renewed itself time after time. In like manner 
the generation now passing has witnessed the destruc- 

35° 



^-J{:-"^1<&^ 



Trinity Church, Summer 
Street, after Great Fire 



WATER AND FIRE 



35^ 



tion and rebuilding of a great commercial quarter. 
The story of these two changes must be told in every 
account of Boston. 

There is no stronger proof of the true citizenship 
of a Boston man of fifty years or more than his point- 
ing out the street corners, in the Back Bay district, 
where as a boy he used to swim, fish, or shoot. The 
tidal flats and waters which have grown into paved 
avenues and luxurious dwelling-houses must have been 
well populated — if we accept all the reminiscences — 
with adventurous youth in every stage of undress. We 
read of Colonel T. H. Perkins, in a still earlier genera- 
tion, shooting snipe on the present playground of the 
Common, and gunning for teal in August, with Harri- 
son Gray Otis, on a creek about where Dover Street is 
now to be found. It is still more difficult to realize that 
only a year or two before i860 the western boundary 
of the Public Garden was a brown picket fence, with 
a muddy beach at its foot. It was the happy thought 
of a few boys — now men in the prime of life, some of 
whose names have become familiar to the American 
public — to use this beach, near the present beginning 
of Commonwealth Avenue, for an elaborate game of 
buried treasure. Their practice of mystery was to bury 
at this spot an old trunk, containing coin finally amount- 
ing to two or three dollars, and at a later day joyfully 
to discover and exhume it. Other boys of meaner 
spirit must have seen them at their dark work, for the 
day came when the digging brought no trunk to light. 
Each member of the secret brotherhood suspected his 



3S2 BOSTON 

fellows of treachery, and like all true diggers for doub- 
loons and pieces of eight, they quarrelled and dis- 
banded. The catalogue of unconventionalities in what 
has so rapidly become the very home of convention 
might be extended indefinitely. Their chief value 
would lie in emphasizing a remarkable transformation. 
Yet the change from happy hunting-ground to modern 
city has not been the work of a day. 

The initial step in the great change was taken in 
1 8 14, when the General Court granted a charter em- 
powering the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation 
to build a dam from the Charles Street end of Beacon 
Street to the opposite point of land in Brookline, and 
a cross-dam from a point in Roxbury to this main 
structure which became known as the Mill-Dam, or 
Western Avenue. Each dam was to be also a road- 
way, with toll-gates for tribute from travellers. An 
important element of the project was the use and 
leasing of power from the confined tide-water for mill 
purposes. The undertaking had a purely commercial 
basis. In 1821 the Mill-Dam was opened for passen- 
gers, and the spokesman of the occasion reminded his 
hearers of the time when Boston had but one connec- 
tion with the main land. " Then," he said, " our town 
resembled a hand, but it was a closed one. It is now 
open and well spread. Charlestown, Cambridge, South 
Boston, and Craigie's bridges have added each a finger, 
and lately our enterprising citizens have joined the 
firm and substantial thumb over which we now ride." 
The more liberal image, drawn by Mather Byles, of 



WATER AND FIRE 2S3 

" Boston, Mistress of the Towns, 
Whom the pleas' d Bay, with am'rous arms surrounds," 

had already been rendered obsolete. 

Before long it became evident that the Mill Cor- 
poration had enough to do in caring for the new 
roadways, which, planted with straggling trees, became 
popular drives in and out of the city. Accordingly, 
the stockholders organized the Boston Water-Power 
Company, which in 1832 assumed control of the mills, 
the water power, and the lands to the south of the 
main dam, leaving the roads and the northerly lands 
in charge of the older corporation. The conflicting 
interests of the companies, the city, and private land- 
owners, were adjusted by compromises — the first of 
many to be made — before the complete transforma- 
tion of the region could be brought about. The rail- 
roads to Providence and Worcester were incorporated 
in 1 83 1. The Mill Corporation and the Power Com- 
pany resented the encroachments on their preserves — 
all the more because their stock, legitimately allied with 
water, lost half its value. But the railroads were inevi- 
table : so were the consequences of their coming. The 
worst of these was that the Back Bay, with its impaired 
flowage, became, according to a report on drainage to 
the city council in 1849, "nothing less than a great 
cesspool." A sentimental attachment to the sheet of 
water as it had been, kept many persons from realizing 
what had come to pass. Yet a true foresight demanded 
the adoption of radical measures. 

To the state authorities of Massachusetts belongs the 



2S^ BOSTON 

credit of framing these measures and patiently bringing 
them to a practical issue. The reports of the Back Bay 
Commissioners tell a long story of preparation and action. 
In 1852 they pointed out the success with which the 
Mill-Dam immediately below Charles Street had been 
extended for the building of houses now facing the 
Public Garden. A vast extension of the same methods, 
they said in effect, would solve the double problem of 
sanitation and space for the growing city. According 
to an ancient colonial ordinance the commonwealth 
could lay a just claim to all lands adjoining its shores, 
below the line of private rights. In the Back Bay 
there were two hundred acres waiting for the state to 
redeem. Before any definite steps could be taken, 
however, it was necessary to untangle complications, 
almost hopeless, with the corporations, with private 
owners, and, worst of all, with the city government. 
By an unfortunate tripartite agreement in 1856 
between the state, the city, and the Water-Power 
Company, the city acquired an unrestricted right in a 
narrow " gore " of land skirting the Public Garden on 
the west. For a time there was grave danger that the 
municipal authorities, pursuing their general policy of 
obstruction, would dispose of this land for buildings 
quite unworthy of the greater project of the state. The 
dif^culty was settled by an exchange between city and 
state, through which the state was enabled to lay out 
Arlington Street as planned, and the city became pos- 
sessed of a tract of equal value farther to the westward. 
Even as late as June of 1858, when the work of filling 



WATER AND FIRE 



357 



in had begun, Arthur Gilman, an architect deeply inter- 
ested in the undertaking, wrote an open letter to the 
Mayor, protesting against the course of the obstruc- 
tionists, and putting the desperate inquiry, " When 
Charles Street has become the ' Charing Cross ' — 
eastward of which is devoted to the business city alone 
— where are we to look for the Westminster of that 
day ? " So far as the city stood in the way of progress, 
its policy is at this day difficult of comprehension ; for 
Boston had everything to gain, and the state was incur- 
ring every financial risk. 

In January of 1857 the Commissioners appointed 
in the year just ended could inform the legislature that 
the chief obstacles had virtually been cleared away. 
A brief passage from their report shows that they at 
least had a full realization of the importance of what 
they were doing. " The territory in question," they 
said of the Back Bay, "is now a useless and unsightly 
waste. There is, at the same time, a palpable lack 
of room for dwelling-houses in and near the city 
of Boston. Stores are usurping the streets formerly 
occupied by mansions, rents are enormously high, and 
it is becoming a serious problem where the people 
whose business draws them to the metropolis of New 
England and the capital of the state shall be accom- 
modated. The commonwealth's lands in the Back 
Bay are situated in precisely the most eligible location 
for dwelling-houses. The conversion of a waste of 
water into a magnificent system of streets and squares, 
with dwelling-houses for a numerous population, is 



358 BOSTON 

a transformation dictated by the soundest statesman- 
ship and the wisest political economy." So indeed 
the event proved it to be. 

There were doubts in plenty about the very possi- 
bility of handling the great undertaking with success. 
Even in i860 the Transcript quoted "the sagacious 
prediction of a ' young' old fogy," that within the next 
twenty years a dozen houses might be built in the 
new territory. In the same year the following sceptical 
suggestion was brought forward : " There can be no 
question but that a vast quantity of this land will re- 
main unpurchased for thirty, forty, or even fifty years. 
It has taken forty years to build forty houses on the 
Western Avenue, with their unrivalled advantages of 
air and view, both in front and rear, and there are not 
now, and will not be for some years to come, a hun- 
dred men in Boston who are prepared to build those 
' first-class houses ' to which the plan is exclusively 
adapted." These words are taken from the preface 
to a pamphlet containing the petition which George 
H. Snelling offered to the legislature in 1859. His 
plea, embodying the belief that " water is to the land- 
scape what the eye is to the face," was that the plan of 
the Commissioners should be modified by substituting 
for Commonwealth Avenue and the house-lots on each 
side of it a broad basin of water running east and west 
through the lands of the state. The prevalence of 
southwest winds in summer was warmly urged as a 
reason for leaving this space unfilled. The plan re- 
ceived the cordial support of certain newspapers and 



WATER AND FIRE 359 

men of influence. A letter from Charles Sumner 
expressed his gratitude for Mr. Snelling's " timely 
intervention to save our Boston Common, by keeping 
it open to the western breezes and to the setting sun." 
But the Common was reserved for subsequent salva- 
tions, and the Commissioners' plan remained unaltered. 





Site of Mechanics' Fair Building, 1871. 

For the actual labor of filling the territory the Com- 
missioners entered into arrangements with a firm of 
railroad contractors, Goss and Munson, who began 
their work about the middle of May, 1858. The hills 
of Boston had by this time yielded all the earth they 
could spare to the surrounding waters. It was neces- 
sary, therefore, to go afield for the gravel demanded for 
the new work. To expedite its transportation from 
Needham, whence it was digged, the contractors built 
six miles of railroad. Their trains of thirty-five cars 
each made sixteen trips a day, and nine or ten by night. 
Steam excavators, filling a car with two disgorgements, 
could load a train in ten minutes. Every forty-five min- 
utes one of these trains arrived at the Back Bay. In a 
single day the space of about two house-lots was filled. 

The contractors received their first payment out 
of the proceeds of the sale of flats to the pioneer 



360 BOSTON 

buyers, William W. Goddard and T. Bigelow Law- 
rence. Later payments were made through the dis- 
posal of lands actually filled, and by the transfer of 
unfilled spots to the contractors themselves, who in 
time turned them into money. Before the work had 
gone far there were scenes more characteristic of a 
western " boom " town than of the long-established 
seaboard city. In October of i860, for example, the 
Advertiser pictures the auctioneer of house-lots taking 
" his station at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue 
and Berkeley Street, upon a platform of boards laid 
across the corner of the rough fence which has been put 
up to protect the park in the middle of the avenue." 
Nine months earlier the same " respectable daily " had 
made the report : " The whole area east of Berkeley 
Street is now entirely filled. We say that the comple- 
tion of the remainder is a matter of perfect certainty." 
In May of the same year the Transcript reported the 
houses on Arlington Street nearing completion, and 
" Dr. Gannett's church six or eight feet above ground." 
Through all this period of early building the sales of 
still newer land were going steadily forward. The 
Mill Corporation, with its holdings on the water side 
of Beacon Street, and the Water-Power Company, 
with the tract south of the building lots on Boylston 
Street, — including the districts of Columbus and Hunt- 
ington avenues, — had been converted by events into 
great land companies. By an early arrangement with 
the Water-Power Company, the Commissioners had 
brought the most desirable parts of what is now called 






% 







WATER AND FIRE 363 

the Back Bay into the hands of the state. The record 
of its success as a land company is brief and convinc- 
ing. Without the expenditure of a dollar its treasury 
was enriched by three millions. Amongst the good 
uses to which its gains were put, should be remembered 
the liberal grant of land to the Institute of Technology 
and Society of Natural History, the great increase 
of the state school fund, and the outright grants of 
1 1 00,000 to the Agassiz Museum at Harvard, ^50,000 
to Tufts College, ^25,000 each to Williams, Amherst, 
and the Wesleyan Academy at Wilbraham. The land 
speculators, private and corporate, thus paid their in- 
direct tribute to the cause of education. The entire 
history of the enterprise presents a conspicuous ex- 
ample of the successful conduct of a local improve- 
ment by the government of a state. Though the 
city authorities offered for a time more of hindrance 
than of help, their successors in office have found 
themselves ruling what has grown to be a new city. 
Many inhabitants, following Dr. Holmes's example of 
"justifiable domicide," quitted the older overcrowded 
regions for the new. To the transformation of the 
Back Bay the city, exclusive of outlying districts ac- 
quired from time to time, owes much of its increase 
from the 783 acres of the original peninsula to its 
present extent of 1829 acres. The annexations from 
without — South Boston in 1804, East Boston in 
1830, Roxbury in 1868, Dorchester in 1870, Brighton, 
Charlestown, and West Roxbury in 1874 — have in- 
creased the city territory by more than twenty thousand 



364 BOSTON 

additional acres. But by steady degrees the " made 
land " has become the site not only of the best resi- 
dences, but of pleasure-grounds, museums, libraries, 
churches, clubs, hotels, auditoriums, and nearly all 
things that contribute to " the humanities " of modern 
Boston. 

When Cotton Mather put on record the sobriquet 
of Lost-Town, he went on to say of Boston, as Robert 
C. Winthrop reminded the Massachusetts Historical 
Society in 1872: "Never was any town under the 
cope of heaven more liable to be laid in ashes, 
either through the carelessness or the wickedness of 
them that sleep in it. That such a combustible heap 
of contiguous houses yet stands, it may be called a 
standing miracle. It is not because the watchman 
keeps the city. . . . No, it is from Thy watchful pro- 
tection, O Thou keeper of Boston, who neither slum- 
bers nor sleeps." In 1872, when the greatest of the 
" Great Fires " to which Boston has been subject visited 
the city, there was no Cotton Mather to put his inter- 
pretation upon it. The work of less than twenty-four 
hours, however, was comparable in its importance to 
the labor of years in the Back Bay, and the record 
of its causes and effects has been written with even 
greater fulness of detail. 

It was soon after seven o'clock on the evening of 
Saturday, November 9, 1872, that the fire — its origin 
still unknown — was first discovered in a wholesale 
dry-goods house at the corner of Summer and Kings- 
ton streets. The quarter in which this building stood 



WATER AND FIRE 365 

had been occupied through much of the first half cen- 
tury by the most comfortable residences in Boston — 
square brick mansions often surrounded by gardens, 
to be recalled more vividly perhaps by certain streets 
in Salem, Providence, and Portsmouth than by any 
other existing regions. About 1840 trade began to 
invade the district, and in thirty years had come the 
change creating the need which the Back Bay was 
satisfying. The new business buildings — the head- 
quarters of the wool, cotton, leather, and other indus- 
tries — were dignified structures of granite and brick, 
surmounted too often by 'mansard roofs of wooden 
construction. When the fire broke out the alarm, for 
some reason, was not rung till the flames had gained 
vigorous headway. A further misfortune lay in the fact 
that the horses of the city, including those of the fire 
department, were suffering from the epidemic disease 
known as epizootic. The entire transportation busi- 
ness of the city had been seriously crippled. " It was 
no uncommon sight," an observer has written, " to see 
the porters, clerks, messengers, and stevedores taking 
upon themselves the service of draught animals, drag- 
ging heavy loads from store or warehouse to the various 
depots." What they took as a joke in the prosecution 
of work by daylight became a serious matter in the 
emergency of fire on Saturday night in a deserted 
business region. The fire department, however, had 
guarded against this danger by providing a force of 
extra men to take the place of the incapacitated horses, 
and the seriousness of the handicap has probably been 



366 BOSTON 

overrated. Be that as it may, the firemen summoned 
by rapidly succeeding calls immediately saw that they 
were confronted with difficulties of the first magnitude. 
From the fireman's point of view it was a grave 
matter that the water-pipes and hydrants had not 
been enlarged to meet the demands involved in the 
change from residence to business streets. In a com- 
mon fire this would have been bad enough ; but here, 
as the veriest amateur could see, was a fire of extraor- 
dinary fury and danger. With incredible speed the 
flames spread up and down Summer Street, extended 
along the lower side of Washington Street as far as the 
Old South Church — upon which many spectators 
thought they were looking for the last time — and 
crossed Milk Street, though less violently than if the 
Post-Office building, in process of construction, had 
not blocked the way. Eastward and northward they 
extended to the water front and beyond Pearl Street, 
where all the buildings were aflame in hardly five 
minutes from the time when the first fire appeared in 
them. Engines had come from many neighboring 
places. The skies themselves were said to have been 
a beckoning light for sixty miles inland. The Sunday 
trains brought thousands of visitors to the panic-stricken 
city. Thieves from without and within plied their 
trade. Extra police and a brigade of militia were 
called out to keep the confusion within bounds. 
Through the night and early morning hours poor 
families from the threatened region to the south of 
Summer Street were seen dragging their household 




O .S 






WATER AND FIRE 369 

goods to the Common. Merchants and their clerks 
were bearing what they could rescue of valuable papers 
and wares to the same and more remote places of safety. 
When horses could not be got to help in the work, 
oxen were pressed into service. The nearly continuous 
roar of falling walls, explosions of gas and of gunpowder, 
used with doubtful effect to remove the materials for 
further progress of the fire, added their terrors to the 
night. It was not till four o'clock on Sunday after- 
noon that the fire was really under control. "When 
the sun went down at evening," wrote a contemporary 
annalist of the great disaster, whose words are a warn- 
ing specimen of the kind of writing it immediately 
called forth, " the fire fiend, who had slowly but 
surely wormed himself through the commercial loins 
of our city, eating out the very vitals of our trade and 
our industries, was chained, and the pale moon came 
slowly up to throw its lambent rays into smoky 
clouds that rose from the vast domain of smoulder- 
ing ruins." 

In the language of cold fact, sixty-seven acres of 
land, thickly covered with buildings to the number 
of 767, were laid waste. The estimated loss of prop- 
erty was more than ^75,000,000. In this figure is 
included the value not only of buildings destroyed 
but of the merchandise stored in them. In addi- 
tion to the raw materials and many manufactured 
products which were lost, it happened that the store- 
houses of the district contained the valuable libraries, 
paintings, and collected treasures of art belonging to a 



370 BOSTON 

number of persons who were travelling abroad or for 
other reasons had stored their possessions for safe-keep- 
ing. Many of these objects which nothing could re- 
place were swept out of existence, and fourteen lives 
were lost. Yet the disaster was chiefly commercial. 
Bankrupted insurance companies, whose worthless 
shares were held in many instances by the very mer- 
chants whose more tangible wealth had gone up in 
smoke, were melancholy types and monuments of the 
wholesale ruiri. 

Even while the fires were burning, however, the 
losers were preparing to recover themselves. The Mon- 
day morning papers told the public where the wares 
of dispossessed merchants might be found. In hotel 
dining-rooms dry-goods were offered for sale, and 
tailors made ready to continue their work. Rough 
temporary buildings of corrugated iron went up here 
and there. For the wage-earners thrown out of 
employment — an army of shop-girls was disbanded 
— charitable plans were at once made and acted upon. 
The basement of the Park Street Church, as in the war- 
time days of the Sanitary Commission, became a dis- 
tributing centre for organized help. Local subscriptions 
for those who suffered most directly from the disaster 
quickly rose beyond the sum of $300,000. Chicago, 
grateful for the help it had received from Boston a 
year before under a similar affliction, made generous 
but superfluous offers of aid. " We will share with 
you whatever we have left," was the message from the 
western city. Looking farther into the future, the state 



WATER AND FIRE 371 

and the city passed building and other laws calculated 
to reduce to a minimum the chances of such another 
disaster. The calamity was turned into good account 
also by seizing the opportunity it offered to straighten 
and widen streets, some of which it was difficult even to 
find under the heaps of fallen buildings. The period 
of rebuilding, promptly undertaken, was not the most 
fortunate in American architecture. But the mansard 
roof, fatally responsible for the rapid spread of the 
flames, had received its deathblow. 

Thus a new quarter, better in every way than the 
old, came into being. It was not a matter of outward 
form alone, for the spirit of Boston had truly shown 
itself in the brave recovery. As from the waters of the 
Back Bay, so from the ashes of the Great Fire, rose 
one of the most familiar portions of the city as it is 
known to men to-day. 



XII 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 



Px 




I 



fx — 



r '■ 



f\'2 ;- 

wmi I i ■ 
I L i I.I I 1 I 






N the pages before this 
final chapter the attempt 
has been made to pass in re- 
view the sahent facts of Bos- 
ton history, and to gain some 
acquaintance with the persons 
chiefly concerned in them. 
It has been seen how the 
place had its beginning as 
the chief settlement in a col- 
ony of rare independence, 
due both to the character of 
its founders and to conditions 
in contemporary England. 
In the local life of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centu- 
ries the circumstances have 
been found which made the 
community ripe for the events 
of the revolutionary period. 
It was not only the fact, but almost the inevitable fact, 
that Samuel Adams and other chieftains of revolt were 
Boston men. With the establishment of independence 
we have seen the reasserted primacy of maritime inter- 

372 




i'.ntkance to 
South Terminal Station 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 373 

ests, and the growth of a powerful commercial class 
naturally allied with the political party doomed to 
overthrow in the progress of national life. The impor- 
tant influences of foreign commerce and domestic trade 
and manufacture have been regarded with some refer- 
ence to their effect upon the people of Boston. So 
in the domain of spirit and mind the peculiar debt of 
the community to the Unitarian movement and to the 
nineteenth-century flowering of literary tendencies has 
been recognized. We have found at the same time 
that the greater preachers and writers were not of a race 
apart, but truly represented the best element of the na- 
tive citizenship, the better for their leaven. To all these 
phases of life was added the flavor of moral enthusiasm 
which could not be absent from the headquarters of a 
scheme of reform so far-reaching as that which went 
by the name of antislavery. In less coordinated form 
stood the separate works of men whose monuments 
hold a conspicuous place in the community. Finally, 
the topographic changes wrought by the elements 
which create and destroy a landscape have been noticed. 
If a scientist can reconstruct an unknown fish from a 
single bone, it should require no occult sense to trace 
in the existing city of the twentieth century the results 
of the various forces which for nearly three hundred 
years have in turn directed the men and women of the 
place. 

There is yet another influence to be noted, though 
with nothing of the detail required for the points 
already enumerated. It is almost enough merely to 



374 BOSTON 

say that the geographical relation of Boston to the 
rest of the country accounts for many things, historic 
and present, in its condition. It is placed in a corner, 
not on the main line to anywhere in particular, unless 
it be a destination to be reached by sea. New York, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington stand like 
the separated houses of a country street, not far enough 
apart to prevent the occupants of each from holding 
neighborly relations with all the others. Boston is 
over in the next township, and the people of our 
eastern seaboard have not acquired that western in- 
timacy with the sleeping-car which encourages its use 
as a convenience rather than a necessity. It may be 
that Boston owes to a certain self-sufficiency, which has 
grown out of this partial separation from the main 
currents of national life, some of its reputation for 
aloofness and indifference to the broader interests of 
the country. Such a reputation is not gained without 
cause. Here the cause seems not far to seek in the 
critical spirit keenly developed by local circumstances. 
The critical spirit is peculiar to the looker-on. It 
renders him sometimes a useful, sometimes an ob- 
structive, seldom a popular member of society. He 
is suspected of holding notions of superiority which 
frequently are quite foreign to him. It may be that 
he is a critical spectator more because he cannot than 
because he would not like to be something else. He 
has his uses — perhaps in setting and maintaining 
standards to which others pay an unconscious regard. 
He has also his serious limitations. They are reflected 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 375 

if Boston and Massachusetts be taken as represen- 
tative abodes of the critical spirit — in the striking 
fact that for all their wealth of men of light and lead- 
ing, these places have not, since the time of Adamses, 
yielded a single President to the United States. In- 
deed, through all this period, Franklin Pierce and 
Chester A. Arthur — and they by something like 
accident — have been the only men of New England 
birth to occupy the White House. 

The witty division of Boston itself into " Boston " 
and " Boston Proper " was made some years ago. A 
fuller definition of "Boston Proper" is found in a 
few words spoken by one who knew it well, but 
saw beyond its limits. The term was used, said this 
speaker, to distinguish the "core and centre of in- 
tellectual Boston from its more or less vulgar and 
outlying dependencies. . . . And truly in those good 
old days — back some thirty or forty years in the 
past — there was a Boston within Boston, cultured, 
moral, conservative, and — proper. I feel great ten- 
derness for this dead Boston proper. I was brought 
up in it — or, I might more modestly say, on the out- 
skirts of it — and should like nothing better than to 
chronicle its many virtues, of which I am fully con- 
scious. It had provincial characteristics, good as well 
as bad, and it is to our loss that we have fallen away 
from some of its standards of living. Nevertheless, 
there was in it a certain narrowness of perception, 
which could not easily admit the merit of contem- 
porary character which influenced the world outside 



376 BOSTON 

its own very respectable boundaries. It was apt to 
take its own notions of what was proper as a criterion 
for the rest of mankind; it would in all honesty say 
its Sunday prayer ' for all sorts and conditions of 
men,' but found some difficulty in a week-day effort 
to understand them and to do them justice." 

Especially in the last two of these sentences quoted 
from the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, November, 1884, there is abundant food for 
contemporary thought. What was true of Boston 
fifty and sixty years ago has not grown entirely false. 
There are still the "typical Bostonians" — as the term 
is questionably used — who confuse their local crite- 
rions with those of the world at large. They are the 
persons who maintain toward the stranger the attitude 
which imparts to him a sense of being under suspicion, 
until he explains himself or is adequately explained. 
When, with due caution, the explanation is accepted, 
the stranger also may meet with an acceptance so 
hearty that he will forget his period of suspense. 
This, perhaps, is merely the characteristic to be ex- 
pected in the American city which bears the strongest 
outward resemblance to a city of the British mother 
island. The social attribute of caution and the aloof- 
ness from national life already noted are but symbols 
of a common and continuing spirit — the spirit of 
" Boston Proper." 

The more distinctive attributes of Boston, likable 
and unlovely, blend in the minds of men to create the 
idea for which the name of Boston stands. The idea 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 377 

is such that the definition of Boston as a state of mind 
rather than a city readily takes the fancy. For greater 
accuracy, let us say that the present community is a 
city — very much a city — with a state of mind very 
much its own. The outward and visible sign of it is 
in the streets, the parks, the wharves, the institutions, 
occupied and controlled by citizens in whom, to an 
uncommon degree, dwells a spirit which may be called 
characteristic, a spirit which makes Boston Boston, and 
not a chance assemblage of houses and persons. 

How, then, does the Boston state of mind express 
itself in the twentieth-century city ? Surely, for one 
thing, in a keen sense of civic responsibility, -^hich 
has brought many good things to pass, and promises 
well for the future. The tangible fruits of this spirit 
are to be sought rather in public works than in private 
undertakings. We find a system of parks controlled 
by state and city, providing thousands of acres of wood- 
land, hill, river-bank and stream, sea beaches and play- 
grounds, within and just beyond the city limits. We 
find the passenger service of railroads entering the city 
from north and south brought together in two great 
stations, one of them the largest terminal in the world. 
An elaborate system of street transit, combining surface, 
elevated, and subway methods, now extending by means 
of a tunnel under the harbor itself, has been developed 
by private and municipal enterprise, and ratified at suc- 
cessive steps by the popular vote. As in other cities, 
the rapid growth of electric power has had its effect in 
uniting the interests of the city with those of all the 



378 BOSTON 

surrounding country. But the exceptional good for- 
tune of Boston has lain in the nearness of suburbs of 
uncommon attractiveness, now rendered more than ever 
habitable by those who have their daily work to do on 
the crowded promontory of old Boston. In all these 
developments the vision of the men of action has been 
fixed on the future with a sense of responsibility as 
true as that of Horace Mann when he chose posterity 
for his client. Cause and effect are easily confused in 
the figures of population. It is the fact, however, that 
although Boston with its little more than half a million 
inhabitants stands in the census of 1900 as the fifth 
city in the country, the closely contiguous towns and 
cities included in what is called Greater Boston make 
it the centre of a population numbering well above a 
million. In a radius of fifty miles from this centre 
there is a population so near to three millions that the 
territory about the city of New York is in America 
the only corresponding area more densely populated. 

Like all American cities, Boston has seen the char- 
acter of its population undergo extraordinary changes. 
A careful student of the subject, Mr. Frederick A. 
Bushee, pointed out, as the nineteenth century was 
ending, just what had happened since 1 845. Of the four 
elements in the population at that time, " those born 
in other parts of the United States," he said, "ranked 
first, those born in Boston of American parentage 
second, the foreign born come next, and the children 
of foreigners last." The transformation that had come 
in 1899 ^^^ ^^'■^^ summarized: "The foreign born 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 381 

rank first, the children of foreigners second, persons 
born in other parts of the United States come next, 
and the old Bostonians are last." The great change 
began with the Irish invasion immediately following 
the Irish famine of 1846—7. The city which made so 
prompt and generous a gift as that of Boston to the 
sufferers, and placed the management of it in hands 
so efficient as those of Captain Robert Bennet 
Forbes, commanding the "Jamestown" expedition, 
must have seemed a source of all comfort. Accord- 
ingly, the Irish hastened to its shores. Coming first 
as laborers, with sisters and sweethearts in domestic 
service, the men soon showed their native aptitude 
for politics. It is now more than twenty years since 
the first of the two Boston mayors of Irish birth 
entered upon his four years in office. The city 
government, judged by the names of aldermen and 
council, has long been virtually an Irish organization; 
and "the Boston Religion," if the numerical test be 
applied to it, is no longer Protestant. Indeed, the 
Irish have grown to be the largest single element in 
the population, outnumbering even the Americans born 
in all parts of the United States. Another important 
English-speaking, semi-foreign element is that of the 
British-Americans who have naturally come in the 
greatest numbers to the large city lying nearest 
the Canadian border. For other races, Boston makes 
no attempt to vie with New York and Chicago as a 
Pentecostal gathering place. Yet the recent rapid 
immigration of Russian and Polish Jews, Italians and 



382 BOSTON 

representatives of many other races, confronts the city 
with the puzzling problems common to all the Ameri- 
can centres of population. 

To cope with these new conditions the same efforts 
are making in Boston as elsewhere in America. The 
attempt to amalgamate the diverse elements into a 
common citizenship goes forward through hundreds 
of agencies, — the public schools, the social settlements, 
the organization of charities, secular and religious, de- 
signed to meet every conceivable need of the unfortu- 
nate, but in such a way as to create citizens instead 
of paupers. The municipality itself assumes its share 
in the great undertaking by such means, beyond the 
public schools, as the highly developed system of 
public baths, where the individual, observing simple 
rules for the good of all, may learn the alphabet of 
responsibility and its good results. 

At every turn this principle of responsibility presents 
itself. Yet the best of qualities have their grave de- 
fects, and in Boston it is no rare phenomenon to see 
the sense of responsibility so overplied as to become 
either futile or morbid. The tendency has its pleasing 
manifestation in the fulfilled desire of men and women 
of every common interest to meet for weekly or 
monthly dinners followed by the talking of shop. 
The same tendency is expressed less happily in the 
needless multiplication of agencies for doing nearlv 
the same thing. Not only in the field of benevolence 
and reform may this be seen, but in the more practical 
domain of trade and commerce, where boards and 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 385 

chambers and associations proceed with scattered shots 
and consequently impaired authority. The root of the 
matter hes in a widespread impulse amongst individ- 
uals to " do something about it," which frequently 
means no more than to " talk it over." 

To the critical attitude and the sense of responsi- 
bility, as characteristics of Boston, must finally be added 
that- "good principle of rebellion" which we have 
found Emerson noting in the people of the place 
"from the planting until now." Here we have seen 
rebellion against many accepted things, — royal author- 
ity, the national policy of 1812, the established religion 
of New England, and the constitutional order of sla- 
very. The rebels have never represented the whole 
community, nor always those elements of it which 
seemed surest to prevail. They are still to be seen 
and heard. The Sunday orators on Boston Common 
vent their grievances against an unequal world, gather 
their audiences under the very windows of the clubs 
and dwelling-houses which symbolize the inequalities 
— and are in no wise let or hindered. Rebelling 
against the accepted relations between the spiritual and 
the material in a world compacted of both, another 
element of the community establishes and maintains in 
Boston the " Mother Church " of " Christian Science." 
In quite another sphere of thought and condition the 
Anti-imperialists, true descendants of the good Boston 
Federalists who opposed the Jeffersonian policy of 
aggression and expansion, rebel against the prevailing 
theories of government. 
2 c 



THE MODERN INHERITANCE 387 

There is, moreover, a constant rebellion in Boston 
against the accepted American belief that life consists 
largely in the abundance of possessions. The anxious 
getting and the lavish spending of money cannot be 
added to the catalogue of local qualities. In spite 
of the glittering exceptions which a few names bring to 
mind, there was truth at the bottom of the observation 
recently made and published by an " English New 
Yorker." " On the whole," he said, " I should sum 
up my impressions of Boston by saying that compared 
with the other leading American cities, she stands much 
less in need of the reminder that the life is more than 
meat and the body than raiment." It may be added 
truly to these words that the things of the mind and 
spirit — books, pictures, music, practical religion, the 
love of nature and the healthy sports which bring 
body and spirit together — all these are characteristic 
interests of the place. And they are characteristic just 
because they are so vitally interesting to so large a 
portion of the population of Boston. 

It would be utterly unprofitable to make compari- 
sons in points like these between Boston and other 
places. Comparisons and theories are less important 
than facts. The city as it stands to-day is in many 
respects an outgrowth, a reconstruction, of the very 
facts which the preceding chapters have related. The 
community is but a larger individual in having many 
of its characteristics determined by the generations 
that have gone before. The descendant may not 
have entire freedom to pick and choose between the 



^88 



uosroN 



;inccstiii- who vo^c to the hciich aiul that cuhcr who 
should have climbed the gallows. Hut the people of 
Boston are rich in the inheritances tiiat arc G;ood to 
cultivate ami to transmit. What shall he winnowed 
out ot them all tor posteritv, none mav sav. There 
is vet no reason to tear a discontinuance ot that state 
of mind which is informed peculiarly with the fruitful 
qualities of responsibility and rebellion. 




IM^l'K 



AoiUloniy, Firnch. 3^5. 

Acavloiuy of Music. Uoston. 34.?. 

" Act tv» IMvvoni Sta^v Plays, An," 133. 

Ailams. I'luuies I'nmois, jS^, 044, aSo. 

Adams, John, 14, SS. 80, 00. loj, i J5. J30, 

3*5- 
AilrtiHS. Mi^. John. laj, 
AiUuns. John Quincy, jiv.v, 310. 375. 
Adams, Siuuuol. o«.\ oS, 100-107, li^, xa6, 

134. 135. 144, 140. 148, .J7a, 
AvUuns SohoollKHiso, 330. 
" Avlvonimvs." i;o, 

Asj>s&i«, Louis, ^44. ^a. 

As«ssU Musoun>, Han-si>\l I'niwrsity, 

Akx>tt. An>v»s Utvnson. iJ7, jmo, a-S. 

AUsKm\, Washinjjton, 345, 

.-<•«*>» A»v, ship, t». 

AuUuM^t CoUogr, 3i\?. 

An\ory. rhon»as Coftin, 134, 

Ancient !»»»d Honorable Artillery Com- 

l\iny. J5. 
Anvlovrr Seminary, acH>, aao. 
Andrew. John Albion, a+c*. a&4, aS8-aos, 



Andros, Sir lldmund, 37, 55-58, 69, 80. 

Annex;itions. 303. 

Anthology Club. 130, 140, 1224. 

Anti-Man-Huixtmjr League, aS<\ 

Antinon^ian CvMitiv>\-erey, 14-24. 

Antioch Collegx\ 3ao. 

Antislavery Fair, jo6. 

AntisUwery mo\-en»ent. ^W TUK Sl„\\K 

.■l#/*>.Wcv#T Sfiima\tr\f^ 240, a66, 271. 

Appleton. Thonxas Gold, 837. 

.-I^.V.Vj. ship. 6. 

Arthur. Chester Alan, 375. 

Assis^ants. Court of, 10, n-ia, 35, aS, 3a, 

.■l/ii4«*«/M. ship, 178. 

Atliena?um. .Sfir Boston A. 

3S9 



Atlantic (.'lub. a43. 

JfLiitik- .l/.'*/4/»', a30-a43. 046. 

Attoo, Hawaiian chief, tc>4, 107. 

.\ustin, Henian>in, 147. 

Austin, (.^luuies. 147. 

Austin, Jan\es 'l"ivcothiek. a7i. 

l^ck lli»y, 3^^5. 350-305. 371. 

Hacon. l.eouanl. aao. 

lkunbndj;x-. Willian*. 149, 150. 

Batch, hatter. 130. 

l^ldwin. l.oanuui. 15a, 

lVuic»\»tt. Cieoi^w 330, 248. 

ll;uings. banking-house. 330, 331. 

H*unum. I'hineas Taylor, 343. 

Hivtes. Joshua, 3,<o-333. 

IkMCvm Hill. 9. 31. 47, 15a. 15^;, J74, 3J\.\ 

vV»5- 

HeacvM* tnonument. 15a. 

Bwvher. Kdward. aio. 

IWecher. Lyman. ao3-ao5. aio. 

Belcher, Jonathan, Oo. 74. 

lk»lton\ont. luvrl of. Richarvi Coote, 09. 

Belsham. Thontas, aoo. 

Bennett \^" Boston in 1740"). 79. 

B<Mnai\l. Sir Francis. SS, 101. 

/f(^\'(v /\j/f/',t, a7a, 

Billerica, Mass., iii. 

Blackstone. William. 9, 33. 

/i/i\^,uU ./■ A'lvA'w. 117. 

" Body of 1 .iberties." 13, 44. 

lk>oth. I'Abvin. 340. 

Boston : first step towiial independent 
CvMXtrol. 3; named. 10; early interest 
in education. 35 ; changes in outline 
atid area. 3S, 15a. 350-3tv4 ; local atid 
national history. S7. iia. a5i. aS7-aS8 ; 
siege. 113-iao; e\-j»cuation of. lao; 
new elenxent of leadership in, 134; 
Sunvlay olvserrance, 74. 130-133; 
dranva in. 133-135. 330-340; social 
observances, 136; simplicity of lite. 



390 



INDEX 



137; academic influence, 137; sense 
of responsibility, 142, 377, 382; cau- 
tion, 143, 376; Federalism in, 145- 
150; city government adopted, 155; 
maritime interests, 158 ; missionary 
enterprise, 188; respectability, 230; 
conservative and radical, 256-257; 
women reformers, 265 ; loyalty to 
Union, 288; reading habit, 326; 
music in, 340, 343-345 ; painting and 
sculpture in, 345-346; geographical 
position, 374; critical spirit, 374; 
"Boston Proper" and, 375; popula- 
tion, 378 ; principle of rebellion in, 

385. 387- 

Boston Academy of Music, 343 ; Athe- 
naeum, 139, 140, 224, 303, 315, 326, 
346; Common, 33, 41, 78, 79, III, 120, 
131. 307. 309-310, 351, 359, 369. 385; 
Custom-house, 248; Female Anti- 
slavery Society, 263; Latin School, 
35 ; Library, 326 ; Massacre, 92, 96 ; 
Museum, 309, 340; Museum of Fine 
Arts, 232, 340, 346; Music Hall, 217, 
285, 343; Musical Fund Society, 343; 
Public Library, 232, 304, 326-335 ; 
Society of Natural History, 335, 363; 
Symphony Orchestra, 344 ; Tea Party, 
98, 105-107, 153 ; Water-Power Com- 
pany, 353, 356, 360. 

Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation, 
352-353. 360. 

" Boston Religion, The," 190-221. 

Boston Unitarian ism, 209. 

Boston, England, 10. 

" Bostonnais," 48. 

Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, 267, 273, 276, 
279-280. 

Bowdoin, James, Jr., 121. 

Bovvdoin College, 236. 

Boylston, Zabdiel, 141. 

Bradstreet, Simon, 6. 

Brattle, Thomas, 70. 

Breck, Samuel, 122, 131. 

Bridgman, Laura Dewey, 323. 

Brighton, Mass., 363. 

Britannia, ship, 183-184. 

Bromfield, John, 140. 

Brook Farm, 227-229. 

Brooks, Phillips, 7, 346-349. 



Brooks, Preston Smith, 286-287, 
Brown, Charles Brockden, 223. 
Brown, John, 284-285. 
Brown University, 318, 320. 
Browne, Albert Gallatin, Jr., 289. 
Buckminster, Joseph Stevens, 301. 
Bulfinch, Charles, 135, 138, 152, 163, 323 
Bunker Hill, 112, 117, 280, 306. 
Bunker Hill Monument, 306-308 ; Asso 

ciation, 308. 
Burgoyne, John, 112,117, 
Burke, Edmund, 70, 217. 
Burnet, William, 69. 
Burns, Anthony, 275, 277-280. 
Burr, Aaron, 148. 
Burroughs, George, 62. 
Bushee, Frederick A., 378. 
Bute, Earl of, 99. 
Byles, Mather, 72-73, 352. 

Cadets, corps of, 280. 

Calef, Robert, 62. 

Cambridge, England, 3. 

Cambridge, Mass., 36, 47, 72, 113, 118, 

141, 152, 236-237, 247. 
Cape Breton, 84. 
Cape Hancock, 167. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 228. 
Castle Island, 31, 57,94. 
Catch-mc-if-yoH-can , ship, 177. 
Centinel, Columbian , 131. 
Chadwick, John White, 218. 
Chancery, Court of, 53. 
Channing, William Ellery, 147, 201, 202, 

206, 208, 213, 219, 260, 268-270. 
Chapman, Maria Weston, 265-269. 
Charles I, 7, 26, 27. 
Charles H, 41, 51-53. 
Charles River, 9-10, 34. 
Charles Street Mall, ■]■]. 
Charlestown, Mass., 9, 108, 112-113, 117, 

152. 173. 307. 363- 
Cheever, Ezekiel, 66. 
Chelsea, Mass., 115. 
Chesapeake, ship, 150. 
Chicago, 111., 370. 
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. 

184. 
Child, Lydia Maria, 265-266. 
Choate, Rufus, 273, 305-306. 



INDEX 



391 



" Christian Science," 385. 
Church, Benjamin, 49. 
Church, Brattle Street, 70, 301. 

Christ, 80. 

Cockerel, 72. 

P'irst, 6, 70. 

First, West Roxbury, 215. 

Hanover Street, 210. 

Hoilis Street, 70, 72. 

Manifesto, 70. 

New Brick, 70-71. 

New North, 70-72. 

New South, 70, 74. 

Old South, 70, 74, 93-94, 106, 115, 

126, 140, 220, 366. 
Park Street, 200, 210, 209, 340, 345, 

370- 

Reve7ige, 71. 

Second, 70. 

• Shepard Memorial, Cambridge, 72. 

— Trinity, 349. 

• West, 190. 

City Hall, 330. 

Clarke, James Freeman, 216. 

Clinton, Sir Henry, 117. 

Cochituate, Lake, 308. 

Coddington, William, 6. 

Codman, William C, 179. 

Colonial Boston, 26-53. 

Colonization Society, 257. 

Columbia, ship, 163-168. 

Columbia River, 167. 

Columbus Avenue, 360. 

Commerce, Trade and. See The Hub 

AND THE Wheel. 
Committee of Correspondence, 92, 102- 

103, 106, 108. 
Common. See Boston C. 
Commonwealth Avenue, 351, 358, 360. 
Concert Hall, 117, 122. 
Connecticut, 52. 
Constitution, Federal, 126. 
Co?tstitiition, frigate, 149, 150, 158. 
Constitution Wharf, 150. 
Constitutional Gazette, 116. 
Continental Congress, 103, iii, 116. 
Cook, James, 163. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 223. 
Coote, Richard, Earl of Bellomont, 69. 
Copley, John Singleton, 345. 



Copley Square, 332. 

Copp's Hill, 38, 153. 

Cornhill, 274. 

Cornwallis, surrender of, 122. 

Cotton, John, 7, 13, 17, 58. 

Court House, 274, 277-279. 

"Covenant of Grace," 17-19; of 

"Works," 18. 
Cradock, Mathevv, 27, 28. 
Craft, William and Ellen, 276. 
Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 228. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 31, 50, 115. 
Cunard, Samuel, 181-182. 
Cunard Company, 187. 
Curlew, brig, 179. 
Curtis, Benjamin Robbins, 273. 
Curtis, George William, 228. 
Gushing, John P., 171. 
Cushman, Charlotte, 340. 
Custom-house, 248. 

Dalrymple, William, 93, 94. 

Dana, Charles Anderson, 228. 

Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 244, 273, 277, 

278. 
Dartmouth, tea-ship, 107. 
Davy, Sir Humphry, 324. 
Dealings loith the Dead, 71, 84. 
Declaration of Independence, The, ill, 

121. 
Dedham, Mass., 108, 205, 318. 
Dexter, Timothy, 172. 
Dial, 2.'2rj, 228. 

Divine and Moral Songs, 195. 
Dorchester, Mass., 108, 121, 153, 363. 
Dorchester Heights, 118. 
Douglass, Frederick, 285. 
Dowse, Thomas, 303. 
Drama, 133-135, 339-34°- 
Dred Scott decision, 287. 
Drummond, Henry, 317. 
Dryden, John, 17. 
Dudley, Joseph, 54-55, 69. 
Dudley, Thomas, 32-33, 54. 
Dunton, bookseller, 47, 63. 
Dwight, John Sullivan, 343. 
Dyer, Mary, 41. 

East Boston (Noddle's Island), 141, 150, 
183. 363. 



39^ 



INDEX 



East India Company, 105. 

Elgin, Lord, 310. 

Eliot, John, 49. 

Ellis, George Edward, 49, 201, 203, 207. 

Embargo of 1807, 146, 148-150, 177. 

Emerald, packet, 181. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 14, 39, 156, 

187, 214, 215, 226, 229, 233, 239, 241, 

244, 246, 247, 385. 
Empress o/'the Seas, ship, 160. 
P2ndicott, John, 8, 41, 44. 
Everett, Edward, 168, 172, 236, 259, 

267, 286, 288, 298, 301-307, 314, 332, 

346- 
Examiner Club, 244. 

Faneuil Hall, 83, 84, 93, 117, 133, 134, 

137, 260, 266, 270, 277. 
Faneuil, Peter, 83. 
Farragut, David Glasgow, 172. 
Favorite, brig, 173. 
Federal St. Theatre, 135. 
Federalist, 225. 

Federalist party, 145-150, 299, 385. 
Felton, Cornelius Conway, 332. 
Female Antislavery Society, Boston, 263. 
Fenway, 138. 

Fields, James Thomas, 242-244. 
Fifty-fourth Mass. Regiment, 291-296. 
Figures of the Past, 208. 
Fillmore, Millard, 302, 310, 
Fire, Water and, 350-371. 
Fiske, John, 92, iii. 
Forbes, John Murray, 177, 272, 290- 

291. 
Forbes, Robert Bennet, 171, 172, 381. 
Fort Hill, 38, 250. 
Fort Independence, 57. 
Fort Wagner, 295. 
Foster, John, 47. 

Foundation and Early Years, 1-25. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 77, loi, 318. 
Franklin, Mass., 318. 
Freeman, ]ames, 194-196. 
Freeport, Maine, 132. 
French Revolution, 144-145, 193. 
Frog-pond, 309. 
From Books and Papers of Russell 

Sturgis, 231. 
From Town to City, 123-155. 



Frothingham, Nathaniel Langdon, 201, 

216. 
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 209, 226, 

259- 
Fugitive Slave Law, 272-273. 

Gage, Thomas, 68, 93, 98, loi, 108, 113- 

114, 116, 120. 
Gannett, Ezra Stiles, 258, 360. 
Garrison, William Lloyd, 250-274, 295- 

296. 
Gazette, Salem, 179. 
General Court, 13, 20, 25, 28, 31, 52-53, 

134. 153. 158, 299, 318, 352. 
Oilman, Arthur, 357. 
Glover, Goody, 42. 
Goddard, William W\, 360. 
Godwin, Parke, 228. 

Goffe, regicide, 52. 

Goss and Munson, contractors, 359. 

Granary Building, 158. 

Granary Burying Ground, Old, 88. 

Gray, Robert, 164-167. 

Gray, William, 137. 

Great Seal of New England. 56. 

Great \Vester)i, steamship, 181. 

Greeley, Horace, 228. 

Greenough, Horatio, 308, 345. 

Griffin's (Liverpool) Wharf, 107. 

Guerriere, ship, 150. 

Hale, Edward Everett, 137, 247. 

Hale, Nathan, 234. 

Halifa.x, 120, 181, 182. 

Hallowell, Benjamin, 100. 

Hamilton, Alexander, 148. 

Hancock, John, 102, 122, 124-131, 133- 

135. 144. 146, 164. 
Hancock House, 336. 

Handel and Haydn Society, 309, 340, 

343- 
Harbinger, 228. 
Harper, actor, 134. 
Harrison, Peter, 80. 
Hartford Convention, 150. 
Harvard, John, 47. 
Harvard College, 36, 137, 210, 224, 299, 

302, 309. 
Harvard Hall. 88. 
Harvard Musical Association, 343. 



INDEX 



393 



Hastings, Etheridge and Bliss's book- 
store, 331. 
Hawthorne. Nathaniel, 10, 20, 33, 44. 
123, 236, 242, 248. 

Heath, William, 122. 

Hedge, Frederic Henry, 246, 321. 

Herbert, George, 4. 

Herndon, Wilham Henry, 286. 

Higginson, Henry Lee, 292, 295. 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 228, 247, 
277-278. 

Hill, Hamilton Andrews, 15B, 182, 184. 

Hinsdale, Burke Aaron, 320. 

History of Massachusetts Day, Hutchm- 

son, 98. . , , 

History of New England, Wmthrop s 

Journal, 7. 
HoUis, Thomas, 199. 
Hollis Professorship, 196, 200. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 208, 233, 237- 

239, 240, 243, 244, 246, 247, 300, 313, 

332.363- 
Hosmer, James Kendall, 91. 
Howe, Samuel Gridley, 277, 320-323 
Howe, Julia Ward, 265. 
Howe, Sir William, 117, 118-120. 
" Howe's Masquerade," 123. 
Howells, William Dean, 225. 

HUB AND THE WHEEL, THE, I56-189. 

Huguenot families, 83. 

Hull, Isaac, 150. 

Hull, John, SI, 65. 

Hunt, William Morris, 345. 

Huntington Avenue, 360. 

Hutchinson, Anne, 14-23. 

Hutchinson. Thomas, 51, 67, 69, 88-90, 

93-94, 98, 99-101, 106-107. 
Hutchinson, William, 17, 23. 

Ice trade, 173-176. 
Ichabod, 273. 
Independence, ship, 149. 
Irish element, 381. 
Irving, Washington, 223, 235. 

Jackson, Andrew, 179. 

"]ackson, Charles Thomas, 324-326. 

James 11,55. 57. 60. 

James, Henry, Sr., 246. 

Jamestown expedition, 381. 



Java, ship, 150. 
Jenner, Edward, 141. 
Jewel, ship, 6. 

Johnson, Lady Arbella, 6, 10. 
Johnson, Isaac, 6, 10. 
Johnson, Edward, 37-38- 
Johnson, Oliver, 253, 266. 
Jonson, Ben, 230. 



Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 276, 283. 

Keayne, Robert, 25. 

Kemble, Captain, 44. 

Kidd, William, 69. 

King Philip's War, 49-50- 

King's Chapel ("Stone Chapel"), 71. 

80-83, 139. 194. 343- 
Kingfisher, frigate, 55. 
Knox, Henry, 163. 

Lafayette, Marquis de, 131, 250, 306, 

307, 329, 330. 
' Latest Form of Infidelity, 215. 
Latin School, 35. 
Laud, Archbishop, 7, 27, 28. 
Lawrence, Abbott, 260. 
Lawrence, Amos Adams, 283. 
Lawrence, T. Bigelow, 360. 
Lawrence. William, 283. 
Leddra, William, 41. 
Lee, Charles, 143. 
Leslie, Charles Robert, 233. 
Letters from the Eastern States, 136, 

143- 
Letters to Dr. Channmg, 202. 
Letters to Unitarians, 202. 
Leverett Street jail, 264. 
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 168. 
Lexington, Mass., 112. 
Liberator, 252-254, 260, 267, 272, 274. 
Liberty Bell, 266-267. 
" Liberty Tea," 105. 
Liberty Tree, 99, ii5- 

Library, Boston, 326. 

Library, Boston Public, 232, 304, 326-335- 

Lincoln, Abraham, 286, 288, 290, 302. 

Lincoln, Earl of, 6. 

Lincolnshire, 10, 17. 

Lind, Jenny, 343- 

Lindsey, Theophilus, 200. 

" LITERARY Centre," The, 222-249. 



394 



INDEX 



Liverpool Wharf, 107. 

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 35, 124, 125. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 232, 

233. 236-237, 240, 242, 248. 
Loring, Edward Greely, 279. 
Louis XV'I, 145. 
Louisburg, 84, 85. 
Lovejoy, Elijah Parish, 270-271. 
Lovell, John, 83. 
Lowell, Francis Cabot, 314. 
Lowell, James Russell, 228, 233, 239-240, 

241, 244, 247, 267, 271, 272, 298, 314. 
Lowell, John, 200. 
Lowell, Judge ]ohn, 316. 
Lowell, John, Jr., 314-317. 
Lowell, John Amory, 316. 
Lowell, Mass., 151. 
Lowell Institute, 313-317. 
Lyman, Theodore, 178. 
Lyman, Theodore, Jr., 260, 263. 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 303. 

Macbeth, 133. 

Madison, James, 149. 

Maine, 59, 132. 

Manhattan, 23. 

Mann, Horace, 317-320, 378. 

Marlboro Chapel, 266. 

Martinique, 173. 

Massachusetts Bay Company, 3, 6, 8, 27, 

52-53- 
Massachusetts General Hospital, 239, 

323-325- 

Historical Society, 138,303,364, 376. 

Institute of Technology, 335-338, 

363- 
Massacre, Boston, 92, 96. 
Mather, Cotton, 40, 42, 49, 61-65, I4'^i 

326, 350, 364. 
Mather, Increase, 58-6:, 65, 326. 
Mather, Samuel, 64. 

May, Samuel Joseph, 255, 257-258, 268. 
Mayhew, Jonathan, 190. 
McClellan, George Brinton, 289. 
Men and Monuments, 297-349. 
Mercantile Library Association, 337. 
Merrymount, 10. 
Mexican, brig, 179. 
Michigan Central Railroad, 184. 
Middlesex Canal, 151. 



Mill-Dam (Western Avenue), 352, 358. 

Mill Pond, 152, 153. 

Milton, John, 19. 

Milton, Mass., 108. 

Minute Men, iii. 

Missions, foreign, 188. 

Modern Inheritance, The, 372-388. 

Monthly Anthology , 139. 

Morse, Jedidiah, 199, 200, 

Morse, John Torrey, Jr., 238. 

Morse, Samuel Fin ley Breese, 324, 

Morton, Thomas, 10-11, 26. 

Morton, William Thomas Green, 323- 

326. 
Motley, John Lothrop, 10, 235, 236, 239, 

244, 300, 301. 
Mount Vernon, 302. 
Mount Wollaston, 10. 
Munson, Goss and, contractors, 359. 
Museum, Boston, 309, 340. 
Museum of Fine Arts, 232, 340, 346. 
Music, 340, 343-345- 
Music Hall, 217, 285, 343. 
Musical Fund Society, 343. 

Nahant, Mass., 236-237. 

Narragansett Bay, 33. 

Natick, Mass., 49. 

Navigation Act, 51. 

Needham, Mass., 359. 

New England Antislavery Society, 253. 

New England Conservatory of Music, 

344- 
New England Emigrant Aid Society, 

283. 
New England Loyal Publication Society, 

291. 
New England Magazine, 241. 
" New Exhibition Room," 133. 
Nezu Hazard, ship, 177. 
Noddle's Island, 141, 150. 
North American Review, 139, 224, 301. 
North End, 41. 
North Station, 153. 
Norton, Andrews, 214. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 247, 291. 
Nova Scotia, 59. 

" Old Corner Bookstore," 17, 242, 317. 
Old State House, 145, 264, 279. 



INDEX 



39S 



Oliver, Andrew, 94, 99, 102, 115. 

Otis, Harrison Gray, 134, 137, 147, 155, 

260, 351. 
Otis, James, 88-90, 94, 98. 
Oxenbridge, Jolin, 47. 

Paine, Robert Treat, 96. 

Painting and sculpture, 345-346. 

Panda, schooner, 179. 

Pa?2oplist, 200. 

Papanti, 237. 

Parkman, Francis, 236. 

Parker House, 243, 244. 

Parker, Theodore, 214, 215, 217, 226, 233, 

276, 277, 285, 286. 
Peace Jubilee (1815), 343, 345. 
Peirce, Benjamin, 332. 
Pemberton Hill, 153. 
Pen Portraits, 290. 
Pennsylvania Freeman, 240. 
Pepperell, Sir William, 84. 
Pequot War, 49. 
Percy, Lord, 108, 112. 
Perkins, James, 140. 

Perkins, Thomas Handasyd, 273, 322, 351. 
Perkins, Messrs., 171, 172. 
" Perkins Institution and Massachusetts 

School for the Blind," 320-323. 
Philip the Second, 236. 
Phillips, John, 155. 
Pliillips, Wendell, 265-266, 270-272, 277, 

285. 
Phillips, Sampson & Co., 241. 
Phips, Lady, 61. 
Phips, Sir William, 59-62, 68. 
Pierce, Franklin, 375. 
Pilgrims, 6, 8. 
Pine Tree Shillings, 51-52. 
Pioneer, 240. 
Piracy, 178-179. 

Plymouth, Mass., 6, 8, 50, 52, 59. 
Point Adams, 167. 
Point Shirley, 115. 
Pope, Alexander, 72. 
Pormort, Philemon, 35. 
Port Bill, 107-108. 
Post Office, 366. 
Pownall, Thomas, 86, 88. 
Prescott, William Hickling, 234, 235, 247, 

259. 273- 



Preston, Thomas, 96. 

Prince, Thomas, 72, 326. 

Privy Council, 27, 28. 

Professor at the Breakfast Table, 237. 

Province House, 123. 

Provincial Boston, 54-86. 

Provincial Congress, Massachusetts, iii. 

Provoost, Samuel, 195. 

Public Garden, 351, 356. 

Public Library, 232, 304, 326-335. 

Quakers, 39, 41-42. 

Quincy, Edmund, 126, 241, 270-271, 300. 

Quincy, Josiah, Jr. (patriot), 96, 102, 

106, 298. 
Quincy, Josiah (ist Mayor Q.), 155, 250, 

298-302, 346 ; Life of 126, 300. 
Quincy, Josiah (2d Mayor Q.), 208, 310, 

329- 
Quincy, Josiah (3d Mayor Q.), 295. 
Quincy, Mass., 10, 131. 

Railroad Celebration, 310, 313. 
Randolph, Edward, 53, 55, 58. 
Regulation Acts, 108. 
Remarks on Dr. Ware's Answer, 202. 
Reply to Dr. Ware's Letters, 202. 
Revere House, 273. 
Revere, Paul, 107, in, 112, 126, 158.' 
Revolutionary Boston, 87-122. 
Rhode Island, 23, 40, 50, 52. 
Rhodes, James Ford, 280, 286, 296. 
Ripley, George, 227, 229. 
Robinson, John, 90. 

Robinson, William Stevens (" Warring- 
ton"), 290. 
Rogers, Henry Darwin, 335. 
Rogers, William Barton, 332, 335-338. 
Rose, frigate, 53. 
Rowe Place, 337. 
Roxbury, Mass., 38, 363. 
Royal Exchange, London, 83. 
Ruggles, Timothy, 102. 
Rule, Margaret, 43. 
Russell, Thomas, 172. 

Saint Gaudens, Augustus, 295. 
St. Jago, 163. 

Salem, Mass., 8, 42, 62, 108, 179, 194. 
Salem East India Society, 309. 



396 



INDEX 



Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 6, 12. 

"Sam Adams Regiments," 94-96. 

Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin, 284-285. 

Sanitary Commission, 290, 370. 

Sargent, Lucius Maiilius, 71. 

Saturday Club, 238, 244-246. 

Saugus, Mass., 173. 

School for Scandal, 134. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 233, 329. 

Scribner's Monthly, 173. 

Scudder, Horace Elisha, 239. 

Sculpture, Painting and, 345-346. 

.Seabury, Samuel, 195. 

Seamen's Bethel, 309. 

Selfridge, Thomas Oliver, 147. 

Separatists, 6. 

Sewall, Judge Samuel, 12, 42, 53, 65-67, 

209. 
Shadrach, 274. 
Shannon, ship, 150. 
Shattuck, Samuel, 41. 
Shaw, Lemuel, 205. 
Shaw, Robert Gould, 292-296. 
Shaw, Samuel, 163. 
Shaw Monument, 295-296. 
Shawmut, 9. 
Sherman, Mrs., 25. 
Shirley, William, 79, 80, 84-86. 
Short, Mercy, 43. 
Shute, Samuel, 69. 
Silliman, Benjamin, 316-317. 
Sims, Thomas, 274-275, 277. 
Sirius, steamer, 181. 
Sixth Mass. Regiment, 288. 
Slave and the Union, The, 250- 

296. 
Small-pox, 64, 115, 141-142. 
Snelling, George Henry, 358-359. 
.South Boston, 118, 153, 322, 363. 
Sparks, Jared, 201, 273. 
Stamp Act, 99, loi. 
State Board of Education, 318. 
State House, 152. 
Stevenson, Marmaduke, 41. 
Stillman, William James, 237. 
" Stone Chapel." See King's Chapel. 
Story, Joseph, 28, 300. 
Story, W^illiam Wetmore, 228. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 205, 210, 219. 
Street Ann, 250. 



Street, Arch, 138. 

Arlington, 356, 360. 

Beacon, 33, 234, 352. 

Berkeley, 360. 

Boylston, 99, 158, 332, 360. 

Brattle, 42. 

Charles, 352. 

Chestnut, 340. 

Dover, 38, 153, 351. 

Federal, 135. 

Franklin, 138. 

Hawley, 133. 

Kilby, 145. 

Kingston, 364. 

Marlborough, 129. 

Mason, 330, 332. 

Milk, 93, 366. 

Newbury, 129. 

Orange, 129. 

Park, 158. 

Pearl, 140, 322, 366. 

Pinckney, 33. 

Purchase, 227. 

Salem, 80. 

Spruce, 33. 

State, 93, 145, 147, 279, 285. 

Summer, 337, 364, 366. 

Tremont, 88, 158. 

Washington, 38, 129, 263, 366. 

Winter, 148. 

Strong, Caleb, 148. 

Strong, Fort, 150. 

Stuart, Gilbert, 140, 345. 

Stuart, Moses, 202. 

Sturgis, Julian, 231. 

Sturgis, Russell, 231. 

Sturgis, William, 171, 178. 

Suffolk Resolves, in. 

Sullivan, James, 134, 146, 147, 149. 

Sumner, Charles, 233, 257, 273, 275, 286, 

296. 359- 
Symphony Orchestra, Boston, 344. 

Talbot, ship, 6. 

Taylor, Edward Thompson, 226, 309. 

Tea Party, Boston, 98, 105-107, 153. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 5. 

Thacher, Oxenbridge, 88. 

Thacher, Peter, 71. 

Thayer, Epiiraim, 158. 



INDEX 



397 



Thayer, James Bradley, 291. 

Thompson, George, 263. 

Thursday Lectures, 13, 44. 

Ticknor, George, 231-234, 236, 259, 273, 

332. 
Tontine Crescent, 138. 
Town House, 121. 
Town Meeting, 91, 93, 94, loi, 103, io5, 

108, 124, 154. 
Townshend Revenue Bill, 103. 
Trade and Commerce. See THE HUB 

AND THE Wheel. 
Transcendentalism, 226-229. 
Transcript, Boston Evening, 358, 360. 
Tremont Temple, 284. 
Trimountaine, 9, 10, 38. 
Trotter, Captain (R. N.), 179. 
Tudor, Frederic, 173, 175, 183. 
Tudor, William, 136. 
Tufts College, 363. 
Tyler, John, 308. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 273. 
Underwood, Francis Henry, 241. 
Unicorn, ship, 183. 

Unitarian Movement. See " THE BOS- 
TON Religion." 
" United Colonies of New England," 36. 
University of Virginia, 335. 
Usher, Hezekiah, 47. 
Ursuline Convent, 260. 

Vancouver's journal, 167. 

Vane, Sir Henry, 19-20. 

Vattemare, Alexandre, 329-330. 

Venice Preserved, Otway's, 133. 

"Vigilance Conimittee," 277. 

Vincent, Mrs. (Mary Ann Farley), 

340- 
Voltaire, 239. 

Walker, Francis Amasa, 338. 
Walker, James, 234, 259. 
Walker, William Johnson, 337. 
Ward, Edward, 73. 
Ward, Nathaniel, 13, 24. 



Ware, Henry, 196, 199, 202. 

Warren, John Collins, 324-325. 

Warren, Joseph, 102. 

Warren, William, 340. 

" Warrington" (W. S. Robinson), 290. 

Washington, George, 113, 118, 121, 126, 

130, 140, 302. 
Washington, Martha, 140. 
Washington , ship, 163-168. 
Water anij Fire, 350-371. 
Waterhouse, Benjamin, 141. 
Waterston, Robert Cassie, 304. 
Water-Power Company, Boston, 353, 356, 

360. 
Watts, Isaac, 72, 195. 
Webster, Daniel, 259, 273, 286, 302, 304- 

305. 307. 308, 320. 
Wells, Horace, 324. 
Wendell, Barrett, 62, 206. 
Wesleyan Academy, Wilbraham, 363. 
West Roxbury, Mass., 215, 363. 
Western Avenue, 358. 
Whalley, regicide, 52. 
Wheelwright, John, ig-24. 
Whipple, Edwin Percy, 233, 241, 246. 
Whitefield, George, 70, 74-79. 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 233, 241, 244, 

247, 267, 273, 283. 
Wilbraham, Mass, 363. 
Willard, Samuel, 63. 
Willard, Solomon, 308. 
William of Orange, and Mary, 57. 
Williams, Roger, 33, 39-40, 190. 
Williams College, 363. 
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 248. 
Wilson, Henry, 250. 
Wilson, John, 6, 18, 20, 23, 41. 
Winthrop, John, 3-11, 18-20, 27, 28, 31- 

37. 47. 54- 
Winthrop, Robert Charles, 286, 364. 
Witchcraft, 42-43, 62. 
Wonder- Working Providence, 37. 
Woods, Leonard, 202. 
" Writs of Assistance," 88, 89. 

Zara, 117. 



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